And another blank. None of the known languages or dialects of the Galaxy matched in any way to the phonemes, symbols, or structures of the unknown tongue. Or tongues.
Or gibberish.
After eighteen hours of trying to decide which, Jen Babylon was exhausted. When the skinny form of Doc Chimp peered around the doorframe and asked, "All right if I come in, Dr. Babylon?" he suddenly realized how tired he was.
"Certainly, Doc Chimp. But I was just thinking of going to sleep. Maybe a night's rest will give me a clue about this language."
"It hasn't been working out?"
"Not in the least, Doc. There is no great galactic language cognate to it, both Mimmie and I will attest to that."
"What a shame," the chimp said sympathetically. "I suppose, of course, you've also tried matching against the native languages of Cuckoo? Well, certainly—"
"Native languages?" Babylon repeated.
"—certainly you have, you don't need a dumb old monkey to tell you that\ Please excuse me, Dr. Babylon." The chimp looked embarrassed at his own presumption. "However," he said, "that's not why I'm here. I thought I'd better take you to the hearing myself—this place is so confusing!"
"Hearing?" Babylon realized how fatigued he was; all he could seem to do was repeat what Doc Chimp said. And then he remembered. "The hearing!"
Doc Chimp nodded, his little shoe-button eyes worried. "I wish you'd been able to get a little rest first," he said fretfully. "To make a good impression, you know. Although this isn't anything serious—don't misunderstand me—or at least it shouldn't be. Although the way things are going now, you never know what's going to be serious and what isn't, and that's the truth, Dr. Babylon!"
Babylon took a deep breath, and pulled himself together. The inquiry meeting had escaped his mind entirely, and now that it was at hand it began to seem worrisome indeed. If only Ben Pertin were here to advise him!
But he wasn't, and that was that. "All right," he said. "Just let me speak to Mimmie first."
The T'Worlie was hovering politely a few feet away. "You wish me to proceed with the matches of the Cuckoo tongues in your absence," it trilled, and the Pmal conveyed the English words. "Confirmation, Dr. Babylon. Will do so." And it fluttered away to the instruments, leaving a frying-bacon scent behind that Babylon recognized as laughter.
It was the first real chance Jen Babylon had had to look around the orbiter. The shock of the death of his own duplicate, the rising concern about the council meeting he was about to face, even his fatigue were set aside as he rubbernecked like any tourist. So strange a place! he thought as he launched himself after the chimpanzee from one handhold to another, and: What am I doing here, anyway?
But there was no answer to that.
They shot through corridors, drifted across open common rooms. Babylon had expected to see more beings than were in evidence. They encountered only a few; but what a few! Another of those doughy shape-changing creatures called Sheliaks, a great blue Sirian eye, with little crablike pincers hanging below the orb, passing them with a ripping sound of electrostatic force, a silvery cloud of insectlike creatures that he recognized as Boaty-Bits. Once he saw four or five actual human beings, working over a dismembered copper-colored machine. He almost called to Doc Chimp to pause so that he could speak to them, when he noticed the telltale opacity of expression and incipient locomotor-ataxia gait that told him they were Purchased People. Convicts, who had been bought as proxies by creatures so alien that they could not survive in oxygen-bearing air, supporting a water-based chemistry. He wondered if any of the group who had been transmitted with him were among them, but recognized none.
Doc Chimp was cowering at an intersection, gesturing frantically to him to stop.
Babylon caught a handhold with flailing arms, started to speak, saw the pleading look in the chimp's eyes, and desisted. There was a droning, malevolent sound growing in the next corridor; it peaked, a triangular shape shot swiftly past, and the chimpanzee sighed. "That's a deltaform, Dr. Babylon," he whispered. "They're the worst of the lot. I just didn't want him to see us here."
The little ape's shoe-button eyes were dull, and his fur seemed bedraggled; all the cheerfulness with which he had come to meet Babylon was gone. "Why shouldn't we be here?" he asked the chimp. "I was summoned to the meeting, after all."
The chimp coughed apologetically, lifted his kepi, and scratched the hairy scalp beneath it. "Well, that's what I was just getting around to telling you, Dr. Babylon," he said. "The meeting's not for almost an hour yet. We're going to make a little stop first. We're almost there," he added, pushing himself away and across the broad corridor. Babylon pursued hastily.
"Where's 'there'?" he demanded of the retreating chimp.
"It's Ben Line's room," the chimpanzee called over his shoulder. "Real nice place, too. Old Ben came here years and years ago, you know, so he got first pick of quarters. Fixed it up to suit himself." He caught a holding strap and hung by the side of the passage, just outside a door, until Babylon caught up with him.
Babylon clung to another strap, looking around. It seemed almost ghoulish to be going to the room of his dead friend. "Why are we doing this?" he panted. "Couldn't it wait till after the meeting?"
"I don't think so," the chimp chattered nervously, looking up and down the hall. "You'd better go inside now, Dr. Babylon. This is the place."
Babylon hesitated. "I really don't see why—"
"Just go in, Dr. Babylon!" said the chimp, doing something with the door. As it slid open he caught Babylon's shoulder in his astonishingly strong hand and gently thrust him inside.
The door closed behind him.
The room Ben Line Pertin had slept in was dimly lit, but Babylon could make out the shape. It was a good deal more homey than the bare cubicle Babylon had been given: a faceted, polyhedral enclosure, with most of the interior faces covered with flat photographs of scenes from his life. Next to the entrance was an exterior shot of the great orbiter Sun One, where Ben Pertin had first been transmitted from Earth. Over his bed loomed the immense majesty of a mountain that, Babylon knew, had been the grave of several Ben Pertins; it was called "Knife-in-the- Sky" in one of those Cuckoo languages that, Babylon remembered to hope, the T'Worlie was now feeding into the great Pmals. And, in the bed—
In the bed something was moving. A figure sat up and peered at Babylon, and a familiar voice said, "Well, Jen, about time you got here!"
In astonishment, Babylon lost his grip on the handhold. "Ben!" he gasped. "But—but you're dead."
Two of the facets of the cubicle glowed a little more brightly, as Ben Pertin turned up the lights of his room. "Why, I guess I am, a lot of me," he said bitterly. "Grab hold of that strap, for God's sake. Else you'll be bumping all over the place."
Babylon flailed around until he caught the end of the holding strap and pulled himself back to the wall, still unable to take it in. "You're a tachyon copy," he guessed.
"Well, sure—what else? We all are. But if you mean I'm not the Ben Pertin who got blown away with you down by the old ship you're wrong."
"But we left you there!"
"Yes, you did," Pertin agreed moodily. "Oh, I'm not blaming you—after all, I pushed you in ahead of me. But I have to tell you I didn't like it, after you'd all gone and the tachyon transmitter shorted out. Still, that's all water under the bridge now. The important thing's what we do now."
He sat up, and for the first time Babylon realized Pertin was not alone in the bed. A slower stirring on the far side of the coverings produced a female human face, which stared at Jen Babylon without speaking. "Excuse me," Babylon said automatically.