"Please go away, Jen," Sheryl said softly.
He shook his head, almost ready to admit defeat. What was he doing here, anyway? She had a right to do what she chose with her life— But on the other hand, what she was doing seemed insane, and didn't he owe her at least an attempt to bring her back to her senses? "Do you know what you're doing to yourself?" he demanded.
"Of course I do, Jen! I am redeeming myself—and all the rest of the sad, shamed human race, too! I Cry the majesty of Cuckoo. It is coming to save us all!"
"Oh, Sheryl," he said, pitying and almost fearing her, as one pities and fears a lunatic. "Won't you come with me and let me get you cleaned up, get some food into you, see if you need medical—" He broke off, listening. "What's that?" He turned toward the closed closet door, and Sheryl gazed serenely with him.
"Don't open it, please," she said. It was as if she had asked him to pass the butter. He stared at her, suddenly angry.
"Sheryl! Don't tell me! You can't have another lover in the closet—that's farce!"
"Please don't open the door, Jen," she insisted softly.
He stared at her, then at the door. There was a repetition of the thin, rattling sound that had caught his attention. It made up his mind for him.
"Be careful," Sheryl begged as he whipped the door open, but he hardly heard her. The closet was a closet no longer; it led through the ragged remains of what had been its back wall to the apartment next door. Forgotten garments were hanging on racks still, and he could not see past them; but he could hear, and there were a great many people in that other apartment. People—or something else.
For in the foreground was definitely "something else." It was one of the unearthly crystal crustaceans, far huger at close range than they had seemed from the bridge over the Charles. Standing before it, Babylon could see that it was no terrestrial crab. Apart from the transparency of its body and limbs, its anatomy was only vaguely crablike. No eye- stalks, but two huge bulging orbs like a fly's; no great crushing claws, but half a dozen slim pincers. Yet as it reared up to face him, the limbs clicking against the carapace, it looked surely menacing.
Babylon fell back a step. "What—what's it doing here?"
Sheryl's eyes shone with rapture. "It belongs here, Jen! I don't want it harmed!"
"I won't hurt the wretched thing," he said, falling back as it moved slowly into the room—actually, he was far more worried about harm going in the other direction. "But you have to tell me what's going on!"
"We are redeeming the Galaxy!" she cried proudly. "They're servants of the Crystal Maid, and so am I!"
Babylon stared at her, incredulous. He shook his head. "You're out of your mind," he said. It was not a reproach. It was meant as a statement of fact—fact as Babylon perceived fact—the same conviction that a thousand others like Babylon had held over the millennia, as someone dear to them followed Sun Myung Moon or the Reverend James Jones, or joined the Hitler Youth or the Komsomol, or went singing off to the Crusades. "Anyway, this thing can't be here," he said firmly. "It's dangerous. I'm going to call the police."
He moved toward the stereostage, but the giant glassy creature was faster than he. It scuttled, with a quick, dry, tinkling sound, to put itself in the way.
"Oh, Jen, stop!" Sheryl cried.
But it was not Sheryl that stopped him. The creature rose up, bright, faceted eyes gleaming out of the crystal shell. The flutelike hissing of its breath formed into words. "Oh, Jen, stop," it whispered, and then, "I won't hurt the wretched thing."
NINE
What a place! It had been terrifyingly alien in the first moments, baffling after a day, and now, as time passed and he saw more of its strangeness, it had become totally incomprehensible.
It was also huge—he was just beginning to discover how huge. Jen Babylon's new home was an artifact, created in the first place from tachtran patterns assembling the random elemental particles that floated in space into a tiny orbiter, then gradually expanded by mass drawn from the surface of Cuckoo itself. He had not formed a good idea of its size, because there were parts of it where he was not welcome and parts where neither he nor any other human could penetrate—refrigerated sections, blazing-hot sections, sections filled with poisonous gases or even liquids, where the few representatives of wholly nonhuman galactic races lurked, appearing among the carbon/oxygen/water races only through Purchased People or robots. The few parts he had seen were dismaying enough, especially considering their occupants! The Scorpian robots, the T'Worlie, the Sirians that seemed to be a single immense floating eye, the horse-headed Canopans, the deltaforms—he had not yet managed to catalog them all in his mind, much less to know who they were or where they were from. Less still to know friend from foe.
And why, in so dispassionate a scientific enterprise as the exploration of Cuckoo, should there be friends and foes?
But there were; and Babylon felt himself plunging deeper each day into a kind of paranoia of his own. What saved him was his work. Even his feelings of personal loss and anger receded in the face of the most interesting challenge his professional self had ever received.
The language of the ancient ship was opaque to every probe he could summon to his service. The big farlink computer munched the facts he poured into it, and returned only null results. The datastore he had sent to his other self in Boston had brought nothing in return—not even an acknowledgment. Doc Chimp chattered and joked and sympathized, but could not help; Ben Pertin appeared briefly and mysteriously, most often with dire warnings— "Say nothing to the Canopans!" "Be careful, there's a Scorpian asking questions!"—and then disappeared on strange errands. His best and closest companion was the TWorlie, Mimmie. "Every language must have the same basic structure!" Babylon declared to the little butterfly- thing, getting a sweet carnation-and-maple-sugar scent of sympathy in response. "That's fundamental to the concept of communication. The naming of objects, the description of action, the qualification of the 'nouns' and 'verbs' that they represent—how can you have a language without those things?"
"Agreement," trilled the T'Worlie. "Concur in statements. Conclusion drawn: We will succeed, Dr. Jen Babylon."
"But when?" Babylon snarled, and the T'Worlie fell silent. "There are shared assumptions in all languages, but there are also assumptions that are unique. Or anyway different, and here's an example right now. You don't really understand why I'm frustrated and upset, do you?"
"Agreement," the T'Worlie signaled. "Statement: Our time horizon much longer than yours."
"And therefore you're more patient, right. Well, whoever built that ship has a history completely separate from yours or mine, otherwise we would have found congruences before this. We're wasting our time with Pmals. We need to go back to plotting frequencies, making assumptions, testing them out—like code-breaking. If we only had some native languages to work with."
The T'Worlie chirped, "Statement. Native languages exist. Qualification. Apparently limited to beings of galactic origin, circumstances of presence on Cuckoo not known."
Babylon nodded; it was true that many of the galactic species seemed to have close relatives on Cuckoo. But then he changed the nod to a headshake. "But that's not good enough; we need real autochthonous languages. If we had that, it would be straightforward. The techniques were established long ago, by a man on my own planet named Jean Francois Champollion. He worked with ancient Egyptian, an extinct language of which we had only written records. —What's the matter?"