PROLOGUE
Something is coming.
Something very large is spanning the immense emptiness on the way to something inconceivably larger still . . .
And in it I sleep.
I sleep as I speed through the great nothingness, the width of a planet in every second, with nothing for thousands of years' time behind me, and nothing for thousands of years before. I dream as I sleep. I dream of vast worlds and the unseen threads of purpose that join them; of ships like worlds, and of worlds erupting in ion bursts as they die. I have been sleeping for a time so long that there is no language to describe it. Then, for a moment, I wake.
Is it time?
I reach out to the distant starcloud before me. The stretch is immense, and it weakens me. I catch at a star and taste its planets. I slave some of its living things, and bring them closer for HIM.
HE does not stir.
It is not yet time.
I waken some of my sleeping puppets and hurl them ahead to survey and to learn. And then I return to sleep, while the great cloud turns majestically before me, and we draw ever nearer. Now and then the least of my slaves and senses whisper to me. Strangers have appeared. They touch the farthest outreach of my person. They come, they scramble about; they die.
They are not important. I do not trouble to wake fully for them, because the time is not yet.
But it is coming. It is coming soon.
ONE
Jen Babylon was physically exhausted, but he was too angry to go to sleep. He dropped his briefcase of tapes and transcripts, too precious to trust to a bellboy, in his hut and stamped back along the beach toward the only lights visible, the tethered schooner that served as a bar and late-night snack shop. For a miracle it was not raining, but the mosquitoes were out. In five weeks in Western Polynesia he should have had time to get used to them. But that hadn't happened. He hadn't gotten used to the hostility of the Free Polynesians, either, and if the desk clerk hadn't been one of them he was certainly a sympathizer.
He stopped, his train of thought interrupted. Somebody was walking up out of the lagoon.
For a moment he had, been startled; few of the guests swam after sundown, when some people thought the sharks came in from the open sea. But swimming, after all, was one of the things people came here for, and there was no northern-hemisphere insistence on lifeguards or regular hours here. So it was not surprising there was a swimmer. It was not even surprising that the swimmer was female, and apparently entirely nude. Here there was no northern- hemisphere hangup about skin, either. What was a little surprising was that she was walking straight up to the beach, not sidestepping the little patches of sea growth, not even staying on the paths raked free of shells and broken coral. She reached the high-water mark, and stopped, looking around in what appeared to be some uncertainty.
Babylon stopped a meter or two short of where she stood. >She was a striking woman. Not beautiful, perhaps.
Too slim to be classically beautiful, and her coloring was— strange. It almost did not exist. Even in the weak light from the Moon and from the rigging of the distant schooner he could see that her hair was so pale as to be almost transparent, like spun lucite, and her eyes were almost colorless behind colorless lashes.
He realized he was staring, and stammered, "Excuse me." There was a little pile of clothing tucked between the roots of a banyan. He said helpfully, "Is that yours?"
She looked at him in a strange way. Not as one person usually looks at another, making contact eye to eye, but as one looks at a statue, or a machine. It was not in any way hostile, but Babylon could find no other way to interpret it. He felt himself on the defensive. "Excuse me," he said again. "I'm going to have a nightcap." Just at the pier he turned. She was standing there, with the clothing in her hand, looking thoughtfully at one of the chambermaids going from cabin to cabin to turn down the bedspreads.
He ordered a brandy and ginger ale. His anger had begun to simmer down, but a certain amount of irritation remained to mix with the fatigue. His grant had been for eight weeks in the islands, traveling from one tiny atoll to another to find the oldest surviving Polynesians and get them to speak what they remembered of the native tongue into his bubble-recorder. Of course, there was no such thing as a pure Polynesian tongue anymore. The grandfathers' grandfathers of the old people he talked to had already begun to incorporate words of French and English and Russian into their everyday speech; the consonants had shifted to match the white man's way of writing them down, rather than retaining the original, not quite reproducible sounds of the untouched islands. But that was his specialty. Jen Babylon's first doctorate was in evolutionary linguistics, his second in semantic analysis. He was the world's outstanding expert in the history and development of tongues. "Babylon's Algorithms" were taught in every university in the world, as a procedure for mapping loan words from a known contaminating tongue against current dialects and reconstructing the lost original of the dialects.
Not just in this world. Babylon's contributions to linguistic theory were among the very few specimens of human scientific thought that any of the other races of the Galaxy considered worth the trouble of knowing about That knowledge gave Babylon a good deal of pleasure. It was a source of pride for him. Sources of pride were welcome. Babylon had spent his youth as a college grind, subsisting on scholarships, seldom finding time enough to go out and raise hell with his peers, seldom finding anyone who wanted to share hell-raising with him when he did. He was not the sort of man who attracted women. He was too short, a little too plump, a good deal too soft ever to look heroic or macho, and although he could speak easily in fifteen languages and get by with some difficulty in half a dozen others, he had never learned the words to talk to a girl.
So when the woman from the beach entered the bar he glanced at her only briefly, and then turned away.
She was dressed now—at least, she had wrapped a pareu around her, though she was still barefoot and her glassy-soft hair was wet. To his surprise she came up to the bar next to him. She inspected the stool beside his, sat on it, and said, in a voice almost as colorless as her eyes, "I'm going to have a nightcap."
Well, there were times when you didn't really need the right words. "Would you like to join me? Yes? I'm having brandy and ginger ale."
She looked at the drink as he held it up. "Yes," she said. "Brandy and ginger ale."
But even after he had bought her a drink the woman did not seem to want to talk. She was willing to listen, apparently, as she tasted her drink and stared about the little bar. "I'm going back to Boston in the morning," he offered, without getting a response. She seemed interested in the rope festoons and seashells that were the principal decorations. There was almost no one else in the bar; February was not the tourist season on Moorea, and the hotel's complex of thatched-roof cottages was almost deserted. He tried again. "I've been out in the smaller islands. I'm in linguistics."
The woman did not respond, but the bartender looked up from his American newspaper crossword puzzle. "Were there a lot of those Polyndsie-libre types out there?"
"Quite a few," Babylon admitted. "I think I would have had more cooperation from some of the old people if it hadn't been for them. But they didn't make any real trouble for me."
"Bet they didn't," the bartender said. "They caught one of the ringleaders, you know. That Te'ehala Tupaia. A mad bomber! Worst of the lot. Between them and the Kooks, this place is going to hell."
Babylon was startled. "No! I didn't know you had Kooks out here."