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BABEL
By Wayne Webb
CHAPTER 2
George was immune, and that made him
rare and lucky in some respects. In others it was a terrible burden
to bear. He felt very insulated in his ability, once taken for
granted but now a valuable commodity, ever since the Babel virus took
hold and one by one everyone around him lost the ability to
communicate complex ideas and were reduced to the barest of human
connections.
He had been working with a community in
the countryside where they had a loose collection of a dozen families
and with twenty of more people attached that managed to work
relatively well together under the limits imposed by mime and sign
language when organising a large group of people. They had the basics
covered off, the farming, building and medicine with the people they
had in their groups, though each of these quite often were hampered
by the language problems. The doctor in the group recognised a
handful of basic medications by sight, but not by any distinguishing
markings, so George's job often included scanning and checking
medications for dangerous side effects or warnings.
He was integral to the village, it had
a strong wall surrounding it, and a careful community within those
walls. They had minimal light and power, but that was only used in
the darker months of the year. He had begun to record the history of
the village in a book he had picked up on a raid to the city a few
months ago, but one of the villagers accidentally confused it with
any other piece of written work, paper really was a great
fire-starter and the unreadable symbols on one were as useful or
useless as any other book or magazine. So he found a calendar and
recorded the days as they passed, and using a computer, printer and
some basic forecasting, worked out the following ten years and made
copies ahead of time, in case they ever ran out of paper or power
again.
Pictures became the currency of
information sharing, and artists or anyone with any skill in drawing
were often attached to whatever speaker the community had. George's
artist was Anne, she was his girlfriend before the Babel virus took
hold and was a graphic designer by trade. As communities came
together in the time after Babel took hold and no one was talking or
reading they stuck together like glue, she spoke to him in gibberish
to hear the sound of her own voice and she didn't know for a long
time that he could speak and hear clearly until they came across
other people and she saw him reading the instructions on a generator
that someone had in their farm and made it work. Together they worked
out a system for making instructions, visual picture based
instructions with no symbols, only pictures and diagrams that showed
exactly what to do.
Numbers were as mystifying as letters
and inconsistent in their memory. George had realised unlike the
Babel sufferers that there was no repetition in the gibberish. He had
tried with Anne to get the benchmark for a new language, but each and
every time a word was used the noise associated with it would change.
He suspected, but could not know, that Anne was hearing things
differently every time as well. He would repeat his name over and
over again until she knew, tears streaming down her face that
something was very, very wrong and that it would never get better.
With the picture books of step-by-steps
and the markings that they made using stickers, colour codes and
other non symbol related language they slowly built up a regular
routine and built and rebuilt processes again from books and other
resources that they could salvage. Whenever a new person came to the
community, the first thing they did was bring them to George, who
would see if they were one of the Few or the Babel. Those were his
names for them, no one else had any use of names, those names meant
nothing any more.
The Doctor came to their little group a
little over six months after they had begun to work together really
well, when they figured out how to communicate their basic needs for
communally working as a unit, feeding, clothing and defending
themselves. Apart from the occasional raider, a sole person thieving
and attacking them to take food or items from them, they only saw
individuals who needed help, and here it was off the path enough that
they did not get hundreds, just handfuls, and when a family came
along with enough skills then it was absorbed. She was Doctor Wu, a
chinese immigrant who had trained and studied locally, was as good as
a local, but had been born overseas. She had all sorts of papers and
documents, things she carried with her in suitcases, hanging on to
the legitimacy those qualifications gave her. George could read them
and she could see it in his eyes that he knew, who she was and what
she was. It took no convincing to get her to join their community as
their doctor, she did what she could with what they had to hand, but
her experience and skill saved many lives, though not all of them.
The individuals who turned up needing
help were given it, when it could be given but those not welcome were
shown the exit with pointed hands, not often again but as it was
needed. If you did not work for the group you had no place, in order
to get you had to give, there was not any free-loading, the sick were
cared for but still made an effort, even if it was just watching the
kids while others worked on making a life for everyone's benefit.
George was the judge and jury in all
disagreements, which was hard on him especially in matters that he
had no experience or knowledge of. Interpersonal disputes were
avoided and only theft, assault and abuse were things that had to be
settled for the good of the community. There had been one execution,
one he did not have the nerve to carry out, but one he had someone he
knew could, make happen. It was a new person to the community, and
the person they executed had been with them from very early on.
George figured if it went bad, then they could pass the new guy on
and things would settle down, but once they illustrated the crime, in
pictures that Anne did not want to draw, but had to, they understood
and accepted. The whole time George was in tears, it was a burden he
had to bear, and he had seen enough to know it was true. He saw the
guilt, shame and fear in the eyes of the victim and the perpetrator,
but he would not go. For the sake of the safety of the community and
those they had vowed, silently to protect he had to be stopped.
George saw that and planned to remove him from the earthly bounds of
his life. They could have exiled him, but then he would have been
someone else's problem, there was no way to warn or advise or protect
anyone else, he could not stay and he could not go.
Death was an option. He did not like it
and did not want to do it, but he did. He stood by as the man he had
given the job of holding the criminal down, knocking him unconscious
and rendering him immobile did his job. Then the doctor gave them a
syringe and George stood over the unconscious man, his hands shaking
and not moving. After a minute or so the big man, George named him
Bear, because that was what he thought of when he saw him, took the
needle and injected it into the criminal. His name had been Frank, or
so the drivers licence he still proudly held had said, he kept it not
for the words on it but the picture that said who he was. George had
seen most peoples ID's from wallets and purses held on to for no
other purpose than attaching to the reality they once had.
Frank died in a short while, his lungs
and breathing halted by the morphine, the drug, the dosage and the
application of it all sorted by George, Doctor Wu was unable to
recognise any of her medication without George and Anne's help and
illustrations. Painkillers had people with lightning striking them,
with an arrow pointing to a smile. Other drugs were harder to
describe, but with a few books and some of the manuals that Doctor Wu
brought with her they figured out how to apply the medicine they
could lay their hands on.
Others came and sometimes they doubled
up on skills and the community grew too large, and they had to
splinter off. Relationships formed, sometimes good and sometimes not,
these things lead to new communities, nearby land was apportioned and
George set them up and would sometimes spend time travelling between
them assisting where he could. When he came across the first person
like him who was one of the Few, they spoke for days and caught up on
everything and nothing, just hearing the sounds of their own voices.
It became obvious that the new person had to support the new
community and so they spread out, and made a split and divided
themselves as evenly as possible. People divided themselves, there
were not any arguments, there could not have been. IT made sense and
if someone refused to move, then others would go in their place.
It was after they had split two more
times, when there were four of the Few and well over a thousand of
the Babel that the ships appeared in the sky. Being the first they
all came to George, even the Few among them, but reading, writing and
understanding made absolutely no difference in this situation, and
while he stood there staring at the impossible sky, he was
speechless.
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