"I'm in," he said. "And it is a message."
"What does it say?"
"I haven't the faintest idea."
Carlotta got up and came to look over his shoulder. "It's not even language. It doesn't divide into words."
"That's deliberate," said Bean. "If it divided into words it would look like a message and invite decoding. The easy way that any amateur can decode language is by checking word lengths and the frequency of appearance of certain letter patterns. In Common, you look for letter groupings that could be 'a' and 'the' and 'and,' that sort of thing.
"And you don't even know what language it's in."
"No, but it's bound to be Common, because they know they're sending it to somebody who doesn't have a key. So it has to be decodable, and that means Common."
"So they're making it easy and hard at the same time?"
"Yes. Easy for me, hard for everyone else."
"Oh, come now. You think this was written to you?"
"Ender. Dragon. I was in DragonArmy, unlike most of them. And whom else would they be writing to? I'm outside, they're in. They know that everyone is there but me. And I'm the only person that they'd know they could reach without tipping their hand to everybody else."
"What, did you have some private code?"
"Not really, but what we have is common experience, the slang of Battle School, things like that. You'll see. When I crack it, it'll be because I recognize a word that nobody else would recognize."
"If it's from them."
"It is," said Bean. "It's what I'd do. Get word out. This picture is like a virus. It goes everywhere and gets its code into a million places, but nobody knows it's a code because it looks like something that most people think they already understand. It's a fad, not a message. Except to me."
"Almost thou persuadest me," said Carlotta.
"I'll crack it before I go to bed."
"You're too little to drink that much coffee. It'll give you an aneurysm."
She went back to her own mail.
Since the words weren't separated, Bean had to look for other patterns that might give things away. There were no obvious repeated two-letter or three-letter patterns that didn't lead to obvious dead ends. That didn't surprise him. If he had been composing such a message, he would have dropped out all the articles and conjunctions and prepositions and pronouns that he possibly could. Not only that, but most of the words were probably deliberately misspelled to avoid repetitive patterns. But some words would be spelled correctly, and they would be designed to be unrecognizable to most people who weren't from the Battle School culture.
There were only two places where the same character was apparently doubled, one in each line. That might just be the result of one word ending with the same letter that began another, but Bean doubted it. Nothing would be left to chance in this message. So he wrote a little program that would take the doubled letters in one word and, beginning with "aa," show him what the surrounding letters might be to see if anything looked plausible to him. And he started with the doubled letters in the shorter line, because that pair was surrounded by another pair, in a 1221 pattern.
The obvious failures, like "xddx" and "pffp," took no time, but he had to investigate all the variants on "abba" and "adda" and "deed" and "effe" to see what they did to the message. Some were promising and he saved them for later exploration.
"Why is it in Greek now?" asked Carlotta.
She was looking over his shoulder again. He hadn't heard her get up and come over behind him.
"I converted the original message to Greek characters so that I wouldn't get distracted by trying to read meanings into letters I hadn't decoded yet. The ones I'm actually working on are in Roman letters."
At that moment, his program showed the letters "iggi."
"Piggies," said Sister Carlotta.
"Maybe, but it doesn't flag anything for me." He started cycling through the dictionary matches with "iggi," but none of them did any better than "piggies" had.
"Does it have to be a word?" said Carlotta.
"Well, if it's a number, then this is a dead end," said Bean.
"No, I mean, why not a name?"
Bean saw it at once. "How blind can I be." He plugged the letters w and n to the positions before and after "iggi" and then spread the results through the whole message, making the program show hyphens for the undeciphered letters. The two lines now read
---n--------g---n---n---n---i----n --- g
-n-n-wiggin--
"That doesn't look right for Common," said Carlotta. "There should be a lot more i's than that."
"I'm assuming that the message deliberately leaves out letters as much as possible, especially vowels, so it won't look like Common."
"So how will you know when you've decoded it?"
"When it makes sense."
"It's bedtime. I know, you're not sleeping till you've solved it." He barely noticed that she moved away from behind him. He was busy trying the other doubled letter. This time he had a more complicated job, because the letters before and after the double pair were different. It meant far more combinations to try, and being able to eliminate g, i, n, and w didn't speed up the process all that much.
Again, there were quite a few readings that he saved-more than before-but nothing rang a bell until he got to 'Jees." The word that Ender's companions in the final battle used for themselves. "Jeesh." Could it be? It was definitely a word that might be used as a flag.
h--n--jeesh-g-_en--s-ns--n ---- si --- n --- s--g
-n-n-wiggin --
If those twenty-seven letters were right, then he had only thirty left to solve. He rubbed his eyes, sighed, and set to work.
It was noon when the smell of oranges woke him. Sister Carlotta was peeling a mexerica orange. "People are eating these things on the street and spitting the pulp on the sidewalk. You can't chew it up enough to swallow it. But the juice is the best orange you'll ever taste in your life."
Bean got out of bed and took the segment she offered him. She was right. She handed him a bowl to spit the pulp into. "Good breakfast," said Bean.
"Lunch," she said. She held up a paper. "I take it you consider this to be a solution?"
It was what he had printed out before going to bed.
hlpndrjeeshtgdrenrusbnstun6rmysiz4Ontrysbtg
bnfndwigginptr