Babylon accepted the objects, running his fingers over them as though in that way he could plumb their mysteries. "How do I know who the enemies are?" he asked.
There was silence in the chamber for a moment. Then Redlaw laughed harshly, a sound without amusement. "If only any of us knew the answer to that!" he boomed. "So tell no one! No one but the T'Worlie and the people in this room!"
The hardest part was convincing the T'Worlie that secrecy was important. It was against all their age-old instincts. For more than a million of Earth's years the T'Worlie had thought their long, slow thoughts about the nature of the universe; had sent their slow probes around the Galaxy and outside it; had methodically measured and observed and assessed—and had shared every datum and every thought with all who would listen. Before Mimmie. could understand what Babylon wanted, he required painful explanations; before he could agree to it, he had to consult with the wisest and oldest of the other T'Worlie on the orbiter. They filled the little chamber with their soft, winged bodies and the smell of their discourses with each other—singed hair, burnt sugar, wood violets, now and then an acrid sulfur reek of dissent. Babylon could recognize his colleague, Mimmie, by the pattern of dots on the filmy wings, but the others—all those others! They had names like Nleem and Mlim, Nlem, and Nloom, and they squeaked and whistled at each other far faster than the Pmal could translate.
Babylon left them to it, curling up in a corner of the chamber for an hour's sleep. When he woke up he and Mimmie were alone. He stretched, yawned, and asked, "What's the verdict?"
The T'Worlie whistled gently, "Concurrence. TWorlie have agreed to play this game of your devising, Jen Babylon."
"Thank you," said Babylon, although he was not entirely sure he was grateful. "Game?" Perhaps everything the younger, shorter-lived races of the Galaxy did seemed a game to the T'Worlie, though the games that were being played around Cuckoo seemed particularly nasty. And pointless! What possible advantage could any species get from damaging the cooperative effort?
But then, generations of human beings before Jen Babylon had asked that question of their own species, and never found an answer. He grinned and bestirred himself. The T'Worlie had not been idle while he slept. The stereostage was displaying some of the views Redlaw had brought back from the temple by the lake, and as he approached, the T'Worlie dexterously scanned through to find the one he was interested in, then rotated it so Babylon could see. "Query: Have you observed this star formation?"
It was the interior of the building, with the image of the galactic cluster glowing from above. "Yes, Mimmie. I don't know how old it is, but it's remarkable that it still has power enough to radiate now."
"Observations. First, concur; estimate age not less than one hundred thousand your years, upper limit much higher." And before Babylon could react to that: "Second, observations and analysis of stellar configurations and types indicate no match against known galactic configurations. Conclusion: representation of galaxy not our own."
One more puzzle! But there was not time to dwell on it, there was so much else to worry about. Babylon set aside the question of just who had made that model of a galaxy in favor of the puzzles that were nearer at hand. Why was there no response from that other Jen Babylon on Earth? Who were the beings who had furtively sent Purchased People all over Cuckoo—and why had they done it? Who were the "enemies"—and what were they up to?
And even those questions, which had no answer, drifted into the background of his thoughts as he and the T'Worlie began trying to decipher the new lot of hexagons from the temple.
It was not difficult to make them work. They were of the same design as the ones from the wrecked spaceship, fit as readily into the reader they had brought back into the orbiter. But when they were read, what did they mean? Some were star patterns. Some were what looked like wiring diagrams and structural sketches of a ship like the destroyed one. One whole series showed a sort of bestiary of galactic races, and some that were not galactic, or not recognizable as such—the T'Worlie cooed softly over these, and made copies for the other T'Worlie who specialized in the taxonomy of cultures.
And one hexagon was a total puzzle.
They slipped it into the reader over and over and watched the cube fade, become transparent, light up. What it showed was always the same. A bright disk with dark behind it. A sun, perhaps, as seen from a billion kilometers away. Or a white-hot dime at half a meter, for there was no key to its scale. Alone at first, but suddenly with a thin ring around it, blue and bright-shining, placed like a planet's orbit if it had been a star. A second ring, almost at right angles. A third, and suddenly many, weaving themselves into a wickerwork ball with holes where the poles would be if it had been a planet. Something darker spread over the blue ball. Sections sliding together like pieces of peel replaced on an orange, forming larger sections— finally forming octants like those puzzling octants on the map of Cuckoo.
They played it over repeatedly, the T'Worlie dancing beside it, swooping to study it from all angles, Babylon pausing to munch the dreary synthetic food that kept him alive and returning to study it again. "One thing's certain," he said at last. "It's a machine of some kind, and we've never seen anything like it." The TWorlie did not answer, but Babylon detected a faint wintergreen odor of polite doubt. "That object at the center. It looked like a star. Don't you agree?"
The TWorlie hesitated, then whistled diffidently: "Demurrer: scale not established. Hypothesis: possible representation of submicroscopic object that we do not recognize."
Babylon nodded. "If the thing in the center were a star—oh, but of course it couldn't be. Nothing could be that big! I guess it could even be an atomic particle. Maybe a theoretical diagram for the structure of a quark. But more likely it's larger. Some kind of construction. Could it be—"
He frowned at the fluttering T'Worlie.
"Could it be some kind of advanced spacecraft, with the sun-thing a power source? Look, those polar openings have raised hps around them. Nozzles, maybe, for some sort of plasma jet, if the object could really be a vessel."
Hesitant lemony smell of uncertainy from the T'Worlie. "Conjecture not excluded," it agreed. "Contraindication: no evident space for passengers or payload."
Babylon shrugged irritably. "How do we know it's supposed to carry anything? It could be just a—I don't know, a toy!" He shook his head moodily. "Hell with it. Let's take another look at the biological series—those human-looking bipeds still bother me!"
* ♦ »
They were not left alone. Doc Chimp looked in often, Org Rider and Zara from time to time. Even Ben Omega Pertin roused himself from his hiding place to skulk through the corridors once or twice, then quickly retreated to his privacy—and his vices. The worst interruptions were the peremptory visits from beings other than the humans or the T'Worlie. Three horse-headed Canopans spent an hour listening to the tapes from the wrecked ship and demanding letter-perfect translations—without getting them, of course, since they didn't exist. A Sirian came at unpredictable hours, shaking the door with the spattering electric discharges that were his substitute for a knock, never staying very long, never explaining. Each time there was the great nuisance of having to get the hexagons out of sight and all their notes and drawings under cover. At least they were spared the Scorpian robots, and, above all, the Watcher—