Babel-17

by Samuel R. Delany

"It can't," Carlos said. "When it's in place, it's supported too well. You couldn't crack it with a sledge hammer. This panel carries all the communication circuits."

  Rydra nodded.

  "The gyroscopic field deflectors for all our regular space maneuvering . . ." He opened another door and took out another panel. "Here."

  Rydra ran her fingernail along the crack in the second plate. "Someone in the ship broke these," she said. "Take them to the shop. Tell Lizzy when she finishes reprinting them to bring them to me and I'll put them in. I'll give her the marbles back then."

  II

  Drop a gem in thick oil. The brilliance yellows slowly, ambers, goes red at last, dies. That was the leap into hyperstatic space.

  At the computer console, Rydra pondered the charts. The dictionary had doubled since the trip began. Satisfaction filled one side of her mind like a good meal.

  Words, and their easy pattering, facile always on her tongue, in her fingers, ordered themselves for her, revealing, defining, and revealing.

  And there was a traitor. The question, a vacuum where no information would come to answer who or what or why, made an emptiness on the other side other brain, agonizing to collapse. Someone had deliberately broken those plates. Lizzy said so, too. What words for this? The names of the entire crew, and by each, a question mark.

  Fling a jewel into a glut of jewels. This is the leap out of hyperstasis into the area of the Alliance War Yards at Armsedge.

  At the communication board, she put on the Sensory Helmet. "Do you want to translate for me?"

  The indicator light blinked acceptance - Each discorporate observer perceived the details of the gravitational and electro-magnetic flux of the stasis currents for a certain frequency with all his senses, each in his separate range. Those details were myriad, and the

  pilot sailed the ship through those currents as sailing ships winded the liquid ocean. But the helmet made a condensation that the captain could view for a general survey of the matrix, reduced to terms that would leave the corporate viewer sane.

  She opened the helmet, covering her eyes, ears, and nose.

  Flung through loops of blue and wrung with indigo drifted the complex of stations and planetoids making up the War Yards. A musical hum punctuated with bursts of static sounded over the earphones. The olfactory emitters gave a confused odor of perfumes and hot oil charged with the bitter smell of burning citrus peel. With three of her senses filled, she was loosed from the reality of the cabin to drift through sensory abstractions. It took nearly a minute to collect her sensations, to begin their interpretation.

  "All right. What am I looking at?"

  "The lights are the various planetoids and ring stations that make up the War Yards," the Eye explained to her. "That bluish color to the left is a radar net they have spread out toward Stellarcenter Forty-two. Those red flashes in the upper right hand comer are just a

  reflection of Bellatrix from a half-glazed solar-disk rotating four degrees outside your field of vision."

  "What's that low humming?" Rydra asked.

  “The ship's drive,'' the Ear explained. “Just ignore it. I'll block it out if you want."

  Rydra nodded, and the hum ceased.

  "That clicking—" the Ear began.

  "—is morse code," Rydra finished. "I recognize that. It must be two radio amateurs that went to keep off the visual circuits."

  "That's right," the Ear confirmed.

  "What stinks like that?"

  "The overall smell is just Betlatrix's gravitational field. You can't receive the olfactory sensations in stereo, but the burnt lemon peel is the power plant that's located in that green glare right ahead of you."

  "Where do we dock?"

  "In the sound of the E-minor triad."

  ''In the hot oil you can smell bubbling to your left.'”

  "Home in on that white circle."

  Rydra switched to the pilot. "O.K., Brass, take her in."

  The saucer-disk slid down the ramp as she balanced easily in the four-fifths gravity. A breeze through the artificial twilight pushed her hair back from her shoulders. Around her stretched the major arsenal of the Alliance. Momentarily she pondered the accident of birth that had seated her firmly inside the Alliance's realm. Born a galaxy away, she might as easily have been an Invader. Her poems were popular on both sides. That was upsetting. She put the thought away. Here, gliding the Alliance War Yards, it was not clever to be upset over that-

  "Captain Wong, you come under the auspices of General Forester."

  She nodded as her saucer stopped.

  “He forwarded us information that you are at present the expert on Babel-17."

  She nodded once more. Now the other saucer paused before hers.

  "I'm very happy then, to meet you, and for any assistance I can offer, please ask."

  She extended her hand. "Thank you, Baron Ver Dorco."

  The black of his eyebrows raised and the slash of mouth curved in the dark face, "You read heraldry?" He raised long fingers to the shield on his chest.

  "I do."

  "An accomplishment. Captain. We live in a world of isolated communities, each hardly touching its neighbor, each speaking, as it were, a different language."

  "I speak many."

  The Baron nodded. "Sometimes I believe Captain Wong, that without the Invasion, something for the Alliance to focus its energies upon, our society would disintegrate. Captain Wong—" He stopped, and the fine lines of his face shifted, contracted to concentration, then a sudden opening. "Rydra Wong . . .?"

  She nodded, smiling at his smile, yet wary before what the recognition would mean.

  "I didn't realize—" He extended his hand as though he were meeting her all over again. "But, of course—'' The surface of his manner shaled away, and had she never seen this transformation before she would have warmed to his warmth. "Your books, I want you to know—'' The sentence trailed in a slight shaking of the head. Dark eyes too wide; lips, in their, humor, too close to a leer; hands seeking one another: it all spoke to her of a disquieting appetite for her presence, a hunger for something she was or might be, a ravenous— "Dinner at my home is served at seven." He interrupted her thought with unsettling appropriateness. "You will dine with the Baroness and myself this evening."

  "Thank you. But I wanted to discuss with my crew—"

  “I extend the invitation to your entire entourage. We have a spacious house, conference rooms at your disposal, as well as entertainment, certainly less confined than your ship." The tongue, purplish and flickering behind white, white teeth; the brown lines of his lips, she thought, form words as languidly as the slow mandibles of the cannibal mantis.

  “Please come a little early so we can prepare you—“

  She caught her breath, then felt foolish; a faint narrowing of his eyes told her he had registered, though not understood, her start.

  “—for your tour through the yards. General Forester has suggested you be made privy to all our efforts against the Invaders. That is quite an honor, Madam. There are many well-seasoned officers at the yards who have not seen some of the things you will be shown. A good deal of it will probably be tedious, I dare say. In my opinion, it's stuffing you with a lot of trivial tidbits. But some of our attempts have been rather ingenious. We keep our imaginations simmering."

  This man brings out the paranoid in me, she thought. I don't like him. "I'd prefer not to impose on you, Baron. There are some matters on my ship that I must—"

  "Do come. Your work here will be much facilitated if you accept my hospitality, I assure you. A woman of your talent and accomplishment would be an honor to my house. And recently I have been starved"—dark lips slid together over gleaming teeth—"for intelligent conversation."

  She felt her jaw clamp involuntarily on a third ceremonious refusal. But the Baron was saying: "I will expect you, and your crew, leisurely, before seven."

  The saucer-disk slid away over the concourse. Rydra looked back at the ramp where her crew
waited, silhouetted against the false evening. Her disk began to negotiate the slope to the Rimbaud.

  "Well," she said to the little albino cook who had just come out of his pressure bandage the day before, "you're off tonight. Slug, the crew's going out to dinner. See if you can brush the kids up on their table manners—make sure every one knows which knife to eat his peas with, and all that."

  "The salad fork is the little one on the outside," the Slug announces suavely, turning to the platoon.

  "And what about the little one outside that?" Allegra asked.

  "That's for oysters."

  "But suppose they don't serve oysters?"

  Flop rubbed his underlip with the knuckle of his thumb. "I guess you could pick your teeth with it."

  Brass dropped a paw on Rydra's shoulder. "How you feel, Ca'tain?"

  "Like a pig over a barbecue pit."

  "You look sort of done—" Calli began.

  "Done?" she asked.

  “—in," he finished, quizzically.

  "Maybe I've been working too hard. We're guests at the Baron VerDorco's this evening. I suppose we can all relax a bit there."

  "VerDorco?" asked Mollya.

  "He's in charge of coordinating the various research projects against the Invaders."

  "This is where they make all the bigger and better secret weapons?" Ron asked.

  "They also make smaller, more deadly ones. I imagine it should be an education."

  "These sabotage attem'ts," Brass said. She had given them a rough idea of what was going on. "A successful one here at the War Yards could be 'retty bad to our efforts against the Invaders."

  "It’s about as central a hit as they could try, next to planting a bomb in Administrative Alliance Headquarters itself."

  "Will you be able to stop it?" Slug asked.

  Rydra shrugged, turning to the shimmering absences of the discorporate crew. "I've got a couple of ideas. Look, I'm going to ask you guys to be sort of inhospitable this evening and do some spying. Eyes, I want you to stay on the ship and make sure you're the only one here. Ears, once we leave for the Baron's, go invisible and from then on, don't get more than six feet away from me until we're all back to the ship. Nose, you run messages back and forth. There's something going on that I don't like. I don't know whether it's my imagination or what."

  The Eye spoke something ominous. Ordinarily, the corporate could only converse with the discorporate—and remember the conversation—over special equipment. Rydra solved the problem by immediately translating whatever they spoke to her into Basque before the weak synapses broke. Though the original words were lost, the translation remained: Those broken circuit plates weren't your imagination, was the gist of the Basque she retained.

  She looked over the crew with gnawing discomfort. If one of the kids or officers was merely psychotically destructive, it would show up on his psyche index. There was among them, a consciously destructive one. It hurt, like an unlocatable splinter in the sole of her foot that jabbed occasionally with the pressure of walking. She remembered how she had searched them from the night. Pride. Warm pride in the way their functions meshed as they moved her ship through the stars. The warmth was the relieved anticipation for all that could go wrong with the machine-called-the-ship, if the machine-called-the-crew were not interlocked and precise. Cool pride in another part of her mind, at the ease with which they moved by one another: the kids, inexperienced both in living and working; the adults, so near pressure situations that might have scarred their polished efficiency and made psychic burrs to snag one another. But she had chosen them, and the ship, her world, was a beautiful place to walk, work, live,-for a journey's length.

  But there was a traitor.

  That shorted something. Somewhere in Eden, now . . . she recalled, again looking over the crew. Somewhere in Eden, now, a worm, a worm. Those cracked plates told her: the worm wanted to destroy not just her, but the ship, its crew and contents, slowly. No blades plunged in the night, no shots from around a comer, no cord looped on the throat as she entered a dark cabin. Babel-17, how good a language would it be to argue with for your life?

  "Slug, the Baron wants me to come soon and see some of the latest methods of slaughter. Have the kids there decently early, will you? I'm leaving now. Eye and Ear, hop aboard."

  "Righto, Captain," from Slug. The discorporate crew deperceptualized. She leaned her sled over the ramp again and slid away from the milling youngsters and officers, curious at the source of her apprehension.

  III

  "Gross, uncivilized weapons." The Baron gestured toward the row of plastic cylinders increasing in size along the rack. "It's a shame to waste time on such clumsy contraptions. The little one there can demolish an area of about fifty square miles. The big ones leave a crater twenty-seven miles deep and a hundred and fifty across. Barbaric. I frown on their use. That one on the left is more subtle: it explodes once with enough force to demolish a good size building, but the bomb casing itself is hidden and unhurt under the rubble. Six hours later it explodes again and does the damage of a fair-sized atomic bomb. This leaves the victims enough time to concentrate their reclamation forces, all sorts of reconstruction workers. Red Cross Nurses, or whatever the Invaders call them, lots of experts determining the size of the damage. Then poof. A delayed hydrogen explosion, and a good thirty or forty miles crater. It doesn't do as much physical damage as even the smallest of these others, but it gets rid of a lot of equipment and busybody do-gooders. Still, a school-boy's weapon. I keep them in my own personal collection just to show them we have standard fare."

  She followed him through the archway into the next hall. There were filing cabinets along the wall and single display case in the center of the room.

  "Now here is one I'm justly proud of." The Baron walked to the case and the transparent walls fell apart.

  "What," Rydra asked, "exactly is it?"

  "What does it look like?"

  "A - . . . piece of rock."

  "A chunk of metal," corrected the Baron.

  "Is it explosive, or particularly hard?"

  "It won't go bang," he assured her. "Its tensile strength is a bit over titanium steel, but we have much harder plastics."

  Rydra started to extend her hand, then thought to ask, "May I pick it up and examine it?"

  "I doubt it," the Baron said. "Try."

  "What will happen?"

  "See for yourself."

  She reached out to take the dull chunk. Her hand closed on air two inches above the surface. She moved her fingers down to touch it, but they came together inches to the side- Rydra frowned,

  She moved her hand to the left, but it was on the other side of the strange shard.

  "Just a moment." The Baron smiled, picked up the fragment, "Now if you saw this just lying on the ground, you wouldn't look twice, would you?"

  "Poisonous?" Rydra suggested. "Is it a component of something else?"

  "No." The Baron turned the shape about thoughtfully. “Just highly selective. And obliging." He raised his hand. "Suppose you needed a gun"—in the Barons's hand now was a sleek vibra-gun of a model later than she had ever seen—'' or a crescent wrench.'' Now he held a foot long wrench. He adjusted the opening. "Or a machete." The blade glistened as he waved his arm back. "Or a small crossbow." It had a pistol grip and a bow length of not quite ten inches. The spring, however, was doubled back on itself and held with quarter inch bolts. The Baron pulled the trigger—there was no arrow—and the thump of the release, followed by the continuous pinnnnnng of the vibrating tensile bar, set her teeth against one another.

  "It's some sort of illusion," Rydra said. "That's why I couldn't touch it."

  "A metal punch," said the Baron. It appeared in his hand, a hammer with a particularly thick head. He swung it against the floor of the case that had held the 'weapon' with a strident clang. "There."

  Rydra saw the circular indentation left by the hammerhead, Raised in the middle was the faint shape of the Ver Dorco shield. She moved
the tips of her fingers over the bossed metal, still warm from impact.

  "No illusion," said the Baron. "That crossbow will put a six inch shaft completely through three inches of oak at forty yards. And the vibra-gun—I'm sure you know what it can do."

  He held the—it was a chunk of metal again—above its stand in the case. "Put it back for me."

  She stretched her hand beneath his, and he dropped the chunk. Her fingers closed to grab it. But it was on the standard again.

  "No hocus-pocus. Merely selective and . . . obliging."

  He touched the edge of the case and the plastic sides closed over the display. "A clever plaything. Let's look at something else."

  "But how does it work?"

  Ver Dorco smiled. "We've managed to polarize alloys of the heavier elements so that they exist only on certain perceptual matrices. Otherwise, they deflect-That means that, besides visually—and we can blank that out as well—it's undetectable. No weight, no volume; all it has is inertia. Which means simply by carrying it aboard any hyperstasis craft, you'll put its drive controls out of commission. Two or three grams of this anywhere near the inertia-stasis system will create all sorts of unaccounted-for strain. That's its major function right there. Smuggle that on board the Invaders' ships and we can stop worrying about them. The rest—that's child's play. An unexpected property of polarized matter is tensile-memory." They moved toward an archway into the next room. "Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules. At any angle to the direction that the matter has been polarized in, each molecule has completely free movement. Just jar it, and it falls into that structure like a rubber figure returning to shape." The Baron glanced back at the case. "Simple, really. There"—he motioned toward the filing cabinets along the wall—"is the real weapon:

  Approximately three thousand individual plans incorporating that little polarized chunk. The 'weapon' is the knowledge of what to do with what you have. In hand-to-hand combat, a six-inch length of vanadium wire can be deadly. Inserted directly into the inner comer of the eye, piercing diagonally across the frontal lobes, then brought quickly down, it punctures the cerebellum, causing general paralysis; thrust completely in,' and it will mangle the joint of spinal cord and the medulla: