Planet of Babel

 “We called it Babel, obviously,” said Johann.  He stretched and nearly fell out of the ergonomic chair in the library of the Cheeky Monkey.  “Oops!”

“Why’s that then?”  Captain Rascal, wearing his shiniest uniform and glittering like an iceberg in strong sunlight, looked genuinely puzzled.  Vizile, his first officer, didn’t facepalm as that would have been rude, but his hand did gently, surreptitiously, make its way to his face and massage his cheekbones.

“What?” Johann looked at Captain Rascal as though expecting a punchline.  Rascal just kept smiling at him; grinning almost, and looked like he was waiting for an answer.

“He’s serious,” said Vizile after a moment’s more silence.  “You need to explain why it was obvious to call the planet Babel.”

“He doesn’t kno—“

“He is the captain,” said Vizile.  “And it’s taken the crew threatening a mutiny to stop him using the Butcher on the planet, so please humour him and quickly.”

Rascal’s smile never wavered.  Vizile and Mercanty, the first and second officers, had had to physically block access to the Technology suite, where the controls to the Butcher were located, and keep Rascal out.  Mercanty was now in sick-bay getting her scorch marks tended to, though Rascal had apologised sincerely for hitting her with the hot end of the laser pistol  Vizile was shadowing his boss, acting as an aide but in fact making sure that Rascal wasn’t going to try and turn the Butcher on.

The Butcher, short for Butcher’s Hook, was the ship’s primary observation device and worked by firing various wavelengths of radiation at a target and interpreting the reflections from it.  Rascal’s Butcher had been upgraded in some unspecified past by some unknown engineer and used longer wavelengths and more energetic waves, and seemed to have some kind of anti-cut-off switch that meant that Rascal’s Butcher seemed to take the top sixteen centimetres off whatever it was looking at.

“Well, it’s a library planet,” said Johann. He sounded slightly out of his depth having to explain what he thought that everyone should know.  “The entire planet is just one big library.  Everything down there is part of a hexagonal column, and each column has fourteen stories, and each story is split into hexagonal cells and they contain books.  It’s like the aliens read Borges.”

Rascal’s blank look and never-wavering smile struck Johann’s heart like a dagger.

“You have to know who Borges was,” he said feebly.  The colour steadily seeped from his face and he looked ten years old.  “You must know who Borges was.”

“Babel was a library then?” asked Rascal.  “Interesting.  What kind of books do they have down there then?”

Johann pulled himself together.  “Every possible one,” he said.  “That’s why it’s the whole planet, you see.  Every conceivable book you can write in the alphabet they used is there.  Imagine if you will, that Earth did this.  You would have, oh I don’t know, the library of Babel, for example in there.  In English, French, Spanish… Catalan even!”

“Russian?” said Rascal brightly.

“No,” said Johann.  “Well, maybe yes.  I mean… there would be a transliteration of it in Russian of course, but not in Russian cyrillic, you understand.”

“No,” said Rascal, his smile still perfect.  He stood up.  “So… you want to keep this library?  Without its Russian books?”

Johann forced a smile onto his face wondering if smiling gave Rascal some curious power over the people around him.  It just felt painful to him.  “We must keep the library,” he said.  “It is a valuable insight into the aliens and their psychology.  Plus it’s a whole planet given over to the storage and preservation of books.  The technology in there must be worth a fortune.”

Vizile did facepalm then, and the slap of his hand hitting his face caused Johann to stare at him in shock.

“Aha!” yelled Captain Rascal.  “I knew it!”

“Did you have to?” murmured Vizile to Johann.  He stood up and caught hold of the Captain’s arm.  “Do not—“

“Send down the excavators!” they said in unison.  Somewhere inside the Cheeky Monkey a klaxon started to blare.

“No, Captain, not the excavators,” said Vizile with the patience of a man who is used to having it tested to its limit.  “You want to return with the technology, not just evidence of it.  Don’t destroy it until you have it in working order.  Remember?”

Rascal grinned and bounced on the balls of his feet.  “Of course I do!  Belay the excavators!  Send down the Inquisitors instead!”

The klaxon’s blare ceased for ten seconds and everyone but Rascal looked relieved.  Then a new klaxon started up, an octave lower but somehow slightly louder.

“What does an Inquisitor do?” asked Johann.  The blood had run from his face again and he was trembling.

“Extracts things,” said Vizile in a low monotone.  “Effectively.  I do hope there are parts of this library you can afford to lose.”

“What!?”