"It is unimportant whether you will be back!" the Watcher howled. "Continue transcription!"
The creature was both loathsome and frightening, but with its aid the translation began to become possible. Not easy. But there were breakthroughs. Babylon forced himself to endure the stink and revulsion for hours at a time, tending the Pmals while the Watcher slowly built up a store of congruences.
And of course the little Pmal translators that every being on the orbiter carried as a matter of course were no use. They were no more than compact library stores, with some learning circuits. They contained the roots and equivalences of all the known galactic tongues, and from them were able to construct dictionaries for any related language. For unrelated languages they were of no use at all, and so the first task for Babylon and the TWorlie had been to put together a much larger translator, inputting to the farlink computer. Like all Pmals, their translator contained a nucleus of semiliving cells. The basic design, like so much of the Galaxy's technology, was T'Worlie, but an ancient Earth linguist named Paul M. A. Linebarger had predicted it, and so most humans gave it his initials. It was not enough. To the word-matching and grammar-building of the Pmal, Babylon had to apply his quantum-dynamics procedures, and the T'Worlie contributed his race's own form of entropic analysis . . . and gradually, slowly, the vocabulary grew.
Grammar was another problem entirely. It was on the rock of grammar that the mechanical translators of early Earth languages had failed. The old grammarians tried to construct a logical grammar for the English language and fell victim to the golden-age myth. They thought there must once have been some language that was constructed from prime principles and had not yet been corrupted by the easy slippage of everyday speech (which was wrong in itself), and they thought that language was probably Latin, which was even more wrong. Latin is an inflected language. By the inflected form of the verb "to love" you can see who is the lover and who the loved, a sort of relationship that English conveys by the position of the words in the sentence; so there the grammarians failed.
They failed, even, in deciding just what a grammar was. The old-time conception of a grammar was as a sort of black box. You put thoughts into it, and it converted them into sentences, so that a grammar was defined as a device which could generate every possible grammatical sentence, but would not generate any nongrammatical ones. No use. The definition was circular, like defining "red paint" as that which paints things red. It also took no account of the differences in meaning of the word "grammar," defining a deep structure indispensable to communication as well as the conventions of ordinary talk. But that latter grammar depended on who was using it. That grammar, really, was no more than a system of identification codes to let the hearer know that the speaker was upper-class-educated, working-class-tough, urban black, whatever. One of the great triumphs of quantum-dynamic linguistics was that it cut through the semantic maze and struck right to the heart of meaning.
But not easily.
Not with pleasure, either, as long as the Watcher continued to show up at regular intervals to listen for analogs and input his own language. Babylon and the T'Worlie worked out a bargain—they would take turns in milking the creature's knowledge—and when it was the T'Worlie's turn Babylon explored the orbiter. He did it mostly by himself; Doc Chimp had been staying away, and when the little chimpanzee's absence had continued for several days Babylon sought him out.
He found Doc Chimp huddled over a stereostage, whispering to someone whose identity Babylon could not determine. When he glanced up at his visitor the chimp's expression was almost triumphant, but darkened instantly. "Oh, Dr. Babylon," he chattered. "How nice of you to visit this old monkey. If only you'd given me a little warning, though!" He seemed to be talking as much to the stereo as to Babylon.
"I'm sorry to interrupt you," Babylon offered.
"No, no! Of course not! Just let me say good-bye to my friend here—" Babylon stayed near the doorway, politely out of range, while the chimp whispered a few more words. Babylon had never before been in Doc Chimp's quarters. As a senior inhabitant of the orbiter, Doc Chimp had squatter's rights on the cubicle he preferred, and he had decorated it to suit—a semiliving T'Worlie painting moved slowly on one wall, a stereophoto of the Serengeti plain occupied another. One end of the chamber was filled with a steel-pipe jungle gym, a children's playground thing that seemed to be the chimpanzee's sleeping place, since some of the pipes were hung with scraps of cloth to make a nest. "It's not much," Doc Chimp apologized, "but it's my home, and welcome to it." He sprang to find a drinking bulb and a few pieces of synthetic food. "At least have some coffee, please? Heaven knows it's no good—there's no good food on this whole orbiter."
"I didn't mean to interfere with what you were doing."
The chimpanzee was silent for a moment, scratching at his leathery cheek with one long, skinny finger. "Can you stay here for about an hour?" he demanded suddenly.
"Why—I suppose so, but what for?"
"I want you to meet somebody."
"The last time you brought somebody to meet me," Babylon said, "he secared me half to death. Not to mention how he smelled."
Doc Chimp grinned. "But you have to admit he helped you, right? Well, this time it will be different—although I think you'll find there will be some help, too. They'll be here in a little while, but please don't ask any questions— you never know who might be listening!"
Babylon squeezed a mouthful oi the tepid imitation coffee past his lips, shuddered, swallowed, and said mournfully, "Are we ever going to get to the point where everything isn't a mystery?"
"Not on Cuckoo, I'm afraid. Everything's a mystery— not least of all, what we are doing here!" He pressed some levers on the stereostage and nodded to Babylon to come to look over his shoulder. "There it is," he said, as a holographic virtual image formed in the stage. "Cuckoo. Three hundred million kilometers in diameter and made out of—what? Space? It has so little mass there's nothing we know of that can account for it. See the markings in bright relief? That's what we've mapped so far. And the dark ones? Those are what we've actually explored." He heeled a bar moodily, and the great simulated sphere began to spin until it was almost a blur. "That's what we've got to show for more than a dozen years and a lot—oh, yes, Dr. Babylon, a lot—of lives. And no system, really. Every race wanted a priority given to its own analogs here on Cuckoo. And, my goodness, Dr. Babylon, we don't have unlimited resources! So we wasted fifteen hundred launches, lost more than a dozen landers, killed off better than a thousand creatures, one way or another, just to peek at the least interesting parts. It's all politics, you know. And we terrestrial primates, like you and me, we don't have as much muscle as some of the older, more powerful races. When the T'Worlie want something they get it! Same with the Sheliaks. One of the Sheliaks took a whole expedition down to that jungle there—you can only see it as a blur, but it's a thousand miles across! He was studying thermosynthesis— the way Cuckoo's life feeds on the heat flow from below, like some submarine colonies do in our own oceans back home on Earth, instead of light from the Sun. An interesting study, right? I thought so. That's why I went along . . . And when the Sheliak probed too hard and started a volcanic eruption, I was one of the ones that died!"
"I'm sorry," Babylon muttered. It was a foolish thing to say—how do you condole a person for his own death, when he is alive and well before you?
The chimp nodded moodily. "They're all alike, Dr. Babylon," he sighed. "Crazy theories. The Boaty-Bits and the Scorpians and the Canopans, they all think that Cuckoo might be made of some other kind of matter, with zero mass. Well, that's moonshine! I've been there! So have you! It's solid rock and soil and plants and lakes and oceans."