But there were public documents, material acquired randomly, perhaps as part of Saladin II’s planning, perhaps as part of the postmortem, and never examined terribly closely before. Political pamphlets, position papers, volumes of poetry (the Kurds are extremely poetic), posters, the text of an appeal to the U.N. in 1968 accusing the Iraqis of genocide, the notes of Baathist (reform party) meetings, Command Council decrees, hymns, the usual detritus of a failed political movement, all of it begrudgingly translated into English and programmed into the machine for textual examination.
Bluestein looked at the poem before him. Surely the translation was a poor one, for even allowing for his lack of enthusiasm for the material and even allowing for the Islamic tendency toward flowery, overstated rhetoric, it was simply awful.
ran one bit of doggerel.
Just awful. Only one image arrested him: that “lions of black times” business, although it sounded something like a Roger Zelazny novel, sword and sorcery jazz. At any rate, it certainly was melodramatic.
Crazies. Wild-eyed Moslem fanatics. Imagine writing something so inflammatory, so pointlessly stupid.
Were the Kurds opening a terrorist franchise? Was that what this one was about? Bluestein shook his head. He tended to be moderate and orderly — he was a mathematician, after all — and the rawness of passion, its bald fury and literary artlessness somewhat offended him.
Bluestein had read enough. He cleared a line and typed EN on the screen, directing the computer to remove this one and pick out something new from the Kurdish file.
Another poem! They need an English major, not a math star, thought Bluestein. What was he supposed to make of it, anyhow? The preliminary note explained that this item was from a 1958 edition of Roja Nu, a letterpress literary, cultural, and political journal put out in Beirut by Celadet and Kamuran Bedir-Kahn between 1956 and 1963. Its author was identified in the note as — well, well, well! — U. Beg, later a Kurdish guerrilla. U. Beg?
Bluestein sighed heavily, and began to scroll the piece across his screen, trying to make sense of it. It’s only words, he thought. He mistrusted words; give him numbers any time, and to hell with the Theory of Uncertainty. U. Beg is nothing special. More of the same: standard revolutionary garbage, full of flatulent zeal, outrage, the language soaring off into the realm of the ridiculous.
And on and on it went. Spare me, please. Give me North Vietnamese agricultural production tables or Libyan import quotas or the price of oranges in Marrakech or the detonation sequence in Soviet intermediate range ballistic missiles. What can they want, what do they expect? Get an English major, for Christ’s sakes; and Bluestein knew, because he dated one once, fierce and goofy and promiscuous and dramatic; she’d hurt him very badly.
He swiftly sent the item back into the computer memory and diddled up another from the Kurdish file, and while he waited for it to arrive he nursed his aching finger. His legs ached a little too; he was very tall, and they didn’t quite fit in the cubicle without bending in places where they oughtn’t bend. He wiggled the finger. Broken? No, probably not. He could bend it; it wasn’t swollen too badly.
A new item trundled up across the screen. Poetry? Blessedly, no. The prelim note explained that it was an anonymous propaganda bulletin issuing from HEZ, a radical Kurdish underground group in Iraq, dated June of 1975, just a few months after Saladin II was closed down. It was predictably vitriolic, a torrent of abuse directed at the United States in general and one of its public figures in particular.
Bluestein had read a hundred of them and doubtless would read a hundred more. Pity the people in Translation who sit there all day long and work the stuff into English, so that it can be programmed into the computer memory. Don’t they ever get tired? Bluestein supposed they did not; it was their job, after all. He knew they were all from the National Security Agency over at Fort Meade and must be grinds. Dreadful, uncreative work, and the way they were pouring it out meant somebody had lit a fire over there too, more evidence that this thing was big and that it had people worried. Yost Ver Steeg, the Security chief. It was his name on the system-time authorization forms, and he must have had some clout if he could get this stuff on-systemed this fast, and take up hundreds of pit hours in poring through it. But what could even this Yost Ver Steeg expect? Miracles? It didn’t matter how hard you worked, how many computer hours were invested: the principle involved was the famous one involving poultry — i.e., chicken shit and chicken salad and the impossibility of transmogrifying one substance into the other. Like this grim denunciation he was reading — it proved only that there was hate in the world. We already knew that, thought Bluestein. That’s why we’re here, for God’s sake. So the Third World hates the First. It should surprise nobody and it proves nothing.
Bluestein scanned the green letters, the columns of type flying across the screen. How long is this one, how long will it go on, what the hell is he looking for, why are they so scared, why is this so big, who is Yost Ver Steeg, why doesn’t my finger stop hurting, why did Shelly Naskins dump me three years ago, when is that going to stop hurting and —
Bluestein halted.
Something just went click.
He looked very closely at the words before him, almost saying them aloud, feeling their weight, lipping their shape.
“… a merchant of honey, who offered us sweet promises” — this was an American somebody in HEZ was describing — “and scents of delight. Vet he sold bitter, dead kernels that became bones under the earth.”
Bluestein sat back.
It was the same.
Could it be a coincidence? No, not by any law of probability. Could it be a quote, an allusion? No, if this were a famous line, the preliminary note would have said so.
U. Beg, you bastard, he thought, you wrote the second version, too. You were quoting yourself.
And who was U. Beg talking about?
Bluestein checked, just to make sure, and then he began to dig through his directory for Yost Ver Steeg’s emergency code. And a single image jumped into his head: it had nothing to do with Kurds or kernels or honey or bones. It was a picture of a huge, gleaming plate of chicken salad.