I reach out to the farthest of my watchers and my slaves. One is floating in the all but liquid air of a giant planet With a ruddy, dark sun; one moves about a queer old city, far from her crustacean slaves; one has died on the surface of a cratered rock in the heat of a blazing star.
There is nothing to trouble me in any of this, or in any of the others. But I am troubled.
I have been troubled before by stupid slaves, by fools forgetful of their origins and their destiny, by craven idiots who rose against me, thinking to destroy even HIM. They were themselves inevitably erased. HIS misguided enemies have forever been erased and forever will be, with no need to disturb HIM. Until HIS time, there will never be trouble. There cannot be, for HIS plan allows no trouble.
HIS time? Is it near?
I reach out to every slaved being and instrument, and I find nothing. It is not yet time for HIM.
But soon.
I return to sleep, and to the waiting of many million years.
SEVEN
"1 give you greeting," said a voice in Jen Babylon's dreams. He struggled against waking up, failed, and opened his eyes.
Hanging in the air in front of him was a creature with five oddly placed eyes in a bat's gnarled face, supporting itself on filmy wings. "I am Mimmie, Dr. Babylon," said the creature through the Pmal translator by Babylon's head. "I am familiar with your work on linguistics and wish to associate myself with your efforts."
Still more than half asleep, Babylon said automatically, "Good morning." He pushed the restraining webs of this place he had slept in aside and sat up, catching himself just in time as the muscular effort almost flung him across the sleeping chamber . . . and memory flooded in.
"It is known," the creature went on remorselessly, "that Earth sapients have prolonged start-up periods after power- down status. Query: Are you functional?"
Babylon straightened out, grasping one of the catch- cables and reaching instinctively for his glasses. His ears were still ringing, and he felt a stiffness in his joints that had not been there before coming to this strange place. "If you mean am I awake, yes." Not finding the glasses, he remembered they were no longer necessary.
"Disjunct, Dr. Babylon," the creature said politely. He had already recognized it as a T'Worlie, that oldest of space- going races, the ones who had originally discovered Cuckoo. Perhaps the T'Worlie he had met before. From it a series of pungent, not unpleasant aromas wafted: a vinegary scent of curiosity, burnt-honey of controlled impatience, coppery concern. "You seem perturbed."
Babylon said bitterly, "I guess you could call it that, yes."
"Confirmation," the TWorlie agreed. "You are concerned over recent happenings on surface."
"Wouldn't you be? One of my oldest friends dead—"
"Reference is assumed to Ben Pertin," the T'Worlie piped. "Understood. Offer ameliorating data: There is no shortage of Ben Pertins in vicinity of Cuckoo. Fourteen- plus known specimens, at least three surviving."
Babylon shook his head, incredulous. How could one relate to these creatures who took life so lightly? Even the humans like Ben—like the late Ben—himself? Much less this thing that floated before him.
Still, the situation was interesting. His scholarly mind awoke to curiosity. Babylon had learned some of the T'Worlie scent vocabulary as a part of his graduate studies. But to sniff the stoppers of tubes in the linguistics lab at the university was no real analog to the presence of a creature sending them out in waves of feeling. Babylon shook himself, dismissing the burden of worries and fears as best he could. "Did you say you wanted to help me?"
"Confirmation. Mimmie, deceased, was our race's greatest linguist, Dr. Babylon."
"I see. And you studied with, uh, this Mimmie?"
"Negation, Dr. Babylon. I am identical with this Mimmie. I am Mimmie."
"Oh, I see. You're a tachyon copy," Babylon said, feeling an embarrassment that he could not account for.
Garlicky waves of amusement came from the T'Worlie. "Confirmation. I am tachyon copy of Mimmie. You are tachyon copy of Dr. Jen Babylon."
Babylon was startled, but then he grinned. "Right you are, Mimmie. As you say, Earth sapients have prolonged start-up periods after power-down. IH be pleased and honored to work with you. Do you want to get started?"
"Disjunct confirmation, Dr. Babylon. Confirm that I want to get started. Potential negative feasibility of doing so. Council meeting has been requested with you in attendance concerning events resulting in loss of lander and damage to Being HG-87, Scorpian robot."
Babylon was startled. "I'm going to be put on trial? When?"
"Negative trial, Dr. Babylon. As to time, twenty hours, error bar two hours plus or minus."
"Great!" Babylon snarled. "I come all the way out here to do a job for somebody who gets himself killed in the process, I nearly get killed myself— Oh, hell," he said, as the T'Worlie exuded a saffron scent of sympathy, "I guess there should be some sort of inquiry, after all. Twenty hours? Well. That's a long way away; do you want to get started on the data I brought back?"
Since Pmal translators were a human invention, though greatly improved by technologies borrowed from other galactic races, the T'Worlie was not entirely familiar with them; but with Jen Babylon working alongside he quickly joined in running through the first tests on the data from the wrecked ship.
Pmal translators operated in three separate modes: synchronic, diachronic, and morphological. For most human languages, the synchronic mode was usually enough. It only meant that the translator stored words and matched them against its library of known words. A sample of a few dozen lexigrams would allow it to recognize that the language was, say, from the Indo-European group rather than the Algonkian or one of the languages of Southeast Asia. Generally it could also instantly detect the rattle of Sirians, the tweeting of T'Worlie or the half-dozen other principal galactic tongues. A few more words would generally cut between, say, the Germanic and the Latin; no more than a couple of sentences would allow it to determine that the language was not French or Portuguese or Romanian, but Italian, and then it was only a matter of discriminating the right dialect. From then on it deployed its database of languages and grammars, and cross-mapping was easy.
Of course, it was not really that simple. Spoken languages do not come in discrete packets of "words." "Words" are a linguists' invention. The analyzed sound trace of any spoken sentence shows breaks and fusions that do not correspond to the conventions of the written language. The Pmal circuits that learned to average out the actual pauses and redivide the sounds into the units of formal analysis were quite sophisticated; they were, basically, what made Dr. Linebarger's translators work.
When the synchronic mode failed, the Pmal had the diachronic resource. It matched root words against its database of known protolanguages, looking for resemblances according to a complex algorithm of vowel and consonant shifts. It was this aspect of linguistics in which Jen Babylon was one of the Galaxy's great experts. But it failed him now. The portable Pmal could not even make a beginning. Even the programs Jen Babylon had brought from Earth, now stored in the farlink memory, could find no analogs in any of the families or phyla or even macrophyla in the store.
Remained morphological mapping. In this mode the portable Pmals were very slow, and even Jen's own programs pored over the possible match between sounds, colors, and rhythms of the data taped from the block, matching them against hypothesized events and phenomena, for hours without result. The T'Worlie fluttered away, and returned with a Sirian eye tugging instruments of its own to Babylon's workplace . . .