Babel-17

by Samuel R. Delany

  "The worlds of five galaxies," she repeated. "That's so strange. I'm only twenty-six." Her eyes fixed somewhere behind the mirror. She was only half through her first drink.

  "By the time Keats was your age, he was dead."

  She shrugged. * This is an odd epoch. It takes heroes very suddenly, very young, then drops them as quickly."

  He nodded, recalling half a dozen singers, actors, even writers in their late teens or early twenties who had been named genius for a year, two, three, only to disappear. Her reputation was only a phenomenon of three years duration.

  "I'm part of my times," she said. "I'd like to transcend my times, but the times themselves have a good deal to do with who I am." Her hand retreated across the mahogany from her glass. 'You in Military, it must be much the same." She raised her head. "Have I given you what you want?"

  He nodded. It was easier to lie with a gesture than a word.

  "Good. Now, General Forester, what's Babel-17?''

  He looked around for the bartender, but a glow brought his eyes back to her face—the glow was simply her smile, but from the comer of his eye he had actually mistaken it for a light. "Here," she said, pushing her second drink, untouched, to him.' *I won't finish this.'

  He took it, sipped. "The Invasion, Miss Wong, . . . it's got to be involved with the Invasion."

  She leaned on one arm, listening with narrowing eyes.

  "It started with a series of accidents—well, at first they seemed like accidents. Now we're sure it's sabotage. They've occurred all over the Alliance regularly since December' 68. Some on warships, some in Space Navy Yards, usually involving the failure of some important equipment. Twice, explosions have caused the death of important officials. Several times these 'accidents' have happened in industrial plants producing essential war products."

  "What connects all these 'accidents,' other than that they touched on the war? With our economy working this way, it would be difficult for any major industrial accident not to affect the war."

  "The thing that connects them all, Miss Wong, is Babel-17."

  He watched her finish her drink and set the glass precisely on the wet circle.

  "Just before, during, and immediately after each accident, the area is flooded with radio exchanges back and forth from indefinite sources; most of them only have a carrying power of a couple of hundred yards. But there are occasional bursts through hyperstatic channels that blanket a few lightyears. We have transcribed the stuff during the last three 'accidents' and given it the working title Babel-17. Now. Does that tell you anything you can use?"

  "Yes. There's a good chance you're receiving radio instructions for the sabotage back and forth between whatever is directing the 'accidents'—"

  “—But we can't find a thing!" Exasperation struck. 'There's nothing but that blasted gobbledy-gook, piping away at double speed! Finally someone noticed certain repetitions in the pattern that suggested a code. Cryptography seemed to think it was a good lead but couldn't crack it for a month; so they called you."

  As he talked, he watched her think. Now she said, “General Forester, I'd like the original monitors of these radio exchanges, plus a thorough report, second by second if it's available, of those accidents timed to the tapes."

  "I don't know if—"

  "If you don't have such a report, make one during the next accident' that occurs. If this radio garbage is a conversation, I have to be able to follow what's being talked about. You may not have noticed, but, in the copy Cryptography gave me, there was no distinction as to which voice was which. In short, what I'm working with now is a transcription of a highly technical exchange run together without punctuation, or even word breaks,"

  "I can probably get you everything you want except the original recordings—''

  "You have to. I must make my own transcription, carefully, and on my own equipment."

  "We'll make a new one to your specifications." She shook her head. "I have to do it myself, or I can't promise a thing. There's the whole problem of phonemic and allophonic distinctions. Your people didn't even realize it was a language, so it didn't occur to them—"

  Now he interrupted her. "What sort of distinctions?"

  "You know the way some Orientals confuse the sounds of R and L when they speak a Western language? That's because R and L in many Eastern languages are allophones, that is, considered the same sound, written and even heard the same—just like the th at the beginning of they and at the beginning of theater."

  "What's different about the sound of theater and fAey?"

  "Say them again and listen. One's voiced and the other's unvoiced. They're as distinct as V and F; only they're allophones in English and you're used to hearing them as if they were the same phoneme."

  "Oh."

  "But you see the problem a 'foreigner' has transcribing a language he doesn't speak; he may come out with too many distinctions of sound, or not enough."

  "How do you propose to do it?"

  "By what I know about the sound systems of a lot of other languages and by feel."

  "The 'knack' again?"

  She smiled. "I suppose."

  She waited for him to grant approval. What wouldn't he have granted her? For a moment he had been distracted by her voice through subtleties of sound. "Of course, Miss Wong," he said, "you're our expert. Come to Cryptography tomorrow and you can have access to whatever you need."

  "Thank you. General Forester. I'll bring my official report in then."

  He stood in the static beam of her smile. I must go now, he thought desperately. Oh, let me say something to her. "Fine, Miss Wong. I'll speak to you then." Something more, something—

  He wrenched his body away (I must turn from her) say one thing more, thank you, be you, love you. He walked to the door, his thoughts quieting: who is she? Oh, the things that should have been said. I have been brusque, military, efficient. But the luxuriance of thought and word I would have given her. The door stayed open and evening brushed blue fingers on his eyes.

  My god, he thought, as coolness struck his face, all that inside me and she doesn't know! I didn't communicate a thing! Somewhere in the depths the words, not a thing, you're still safe. But stronger on the surface was the outrage at his own silence. Didn't communicate a thing at all—

  Rydra stood up, her hands on the edge of the counter, looking at the mirror. The bartender came to remove the glasses at her fingertips. As he reached for them, he frowned.

  "Miss Wong?"

  Her face was fixed.

  "Miss Wong, are you—"

  Her knuckles were white and as the bartender watched, the whiteness crept along her hands till they looked like shaking wax.

  "Is there something wrong. Miss Wong?"

  She snapped her face toward him. "You noticed?" Her voice was a hoarse whisper, harsh, sarcastic, strained. She whirled from the bar and started toward the door, stopped once to cough, then hurried on.

  II

  "Mocky, help me'"

  "Rydra?" Dr. Markus T'mwarba pushed himself from the pillow in the darkness. Her face sprung in smoky light above the bed. "Where are you?"

  "Downstairs, Mocky- Please, I've got to talk to you."

  Her agitated features moved right, left, trying to avoid his look. He squinched his eyes against the glare, then opened them slowly. "Come on up."

  Her face disappeared.

  He waved his hand across the control board and soft light filled the sumptuous bedroom. He shoved back the gold quilt, stood on the fur rug, took a black silk robe from a gnarled bronze column, and as he swung it across his back the automatic contour wires wrapped the panels across his chest and straightened the shoulders. He brushed the induction bank in the rococo frame again, and aluminum flaps fell back on the sideboard. A steaming carafe and liquor decanters rolled forward.

  Another gesture started bubble chairs inflating from the floor. As Dr. T'mwarba turned to the entrance cabinet, it creaked, mica wings slid out, and Rydra caught her breath.


  "Coffee?" He pushed the carafe and the force-field caught it and carried it gently toward her. "What've you been doing?"

  "Mocky, it . . . I . . . ?"

  "Drink your coffee."

  She poured a cup, lifted it halfway to her mouth. "No sedatives?"

  "Creme de cacao or creme de cafe?" He held up two small glasses. "Unless you think alcohol is cheating, too. Oh, and there's some franks and beans left over from dinner. I had company."

  She shook her head. "Just cacao." The tiny glass followed the coffee across the beam. "I've had a perfectly dreadful day."

  He folded his hands.

  "No work all afternoon, dinner guests who wanted to argue, and then deluged with calls from the moment they left. Just got to sleep ten minutes ago."

  He smiled. "How was your evening?"

  "Mocky, it . . .it was terrible."

  Dr. T'mwarba sipped his liqueur. "Good. Other-

  wise I'd never forgive you for waking me up."

  In spite of herself she smiled. "I can . . . can always c-c-count on you for s-sympathy, Mocky."

  "You can count on me for good sense and cogent psychiatric advice. Sympathy? I'm sorry, not after eleven-thirty. Sit down. What happened?" A final sweep of his hand brought a chair up behind her. The edge tapped the back of her knees and she sat. "Now stop stuttering and talk to me. You got over that when you were fifteen." His voice had become very gentle and very sure.

  She look another sip of coffee. "The code, you remember the code I was working on?"

  Dr. T'mwarba lowered himself to a wide leather hammock and brushed back his white hair, still awry from sleep. "I remember you were asked to work on ^something for the government. You were rather scornful of the business."

  "Yes. And, . . . well, it's not the code—which is a language, by the way—but just this evening, I—I talked to the General in charge. General Forester, and it happened ... I mean again, it happened, and I knew!"

  "Knew what?"

  "Just like last time, knew what he was thinking!"

  "You read his mind?"

  "No. No, it was just like last time! I could tell, from what he was doing, what he was saying . . . ,"

  "You've tried to explain this to me before, but I still .don't understand, unless you're talking about some sort of telepathy."

  She shook her head, shook it again.

  Dr. T'mwarba locked his fingers and leaned back, Suddenly Rydra said in an even voice; “Now I do have some idea of what you're trying to say, dear, but you'll have to put it in words yourself. That's what you were about to say, Mocky, wasn't it?'-'

  T'mwarba raised the white hedges of his eyebrows. "Yes. It was. You say you didn't read my mind? You've demonstrated this to me a dozen times—"

  "I know what you're trying to say; and you don't know what/'m trying to say. It's not fair!" She nearly rose from her seat.

  They said in unison: "That's why you're such a fine poet," Rydra went on, "I know, Mocky. I have to work things out carefully in my head and put them in my poems so people will understand. But that's not what I've been doing for the past ten years. You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can't express, and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn't hurt any more: that's my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them."

  "The voice of your age," said T'mwarba.

  She said something unprintable. When she finished there were tears starting on her lower lids. "What I want to say, what I want to express I just. . ."Again she shook her head. "I can't say it."

  "If you want to keep growing as a poet, you'll have to."

  She nodded. "Mocky, up till a year ago, I didn't even realize I was just saying other people's ideas. I thought they were my own."

  "Every young writer who's worth anything goes through that. That's when you learn your craft."

  "And now I have things to say that are all my own. They're not what other people have said before, put in an original way. And they're not just violent contradictions of what other people have said, which amounts to the same thing. They're new, and I'm scared to death."

  “Every young writer who becomes a mature writer has to go through that."

  "It's easy to repeat; it's hard to speak, Mocky."

  "Good, if you're learning that now. Why don't you start by telling me exactly how this . . . this business of your understanding works?"

  She was silent for five, stretching to ten seconds. "All right. I'll try again. Just before I left the bar, I was standing there, looking in the mirror, and the bartender came up and asked me what was wrong."

  "Could he sense you were upset?"

  "He didn't 'sense' anything. He looked at my hands. They were clenched on the edge of the bar and they were turning white. He didn't have to be a genius to figure out something odd was going on in my head."

  "Bartenders are pretty sensitive to that sort of signal. It's part of their job." He finished his coffee- "Your fingers were turning white? All right, what was this General saying to you, or not saying to you that he wanted to say?"

  A muscle in her cheek jumped twice, and Dr. T'mwarba thought. Should I be able to interpret that more specifically than just her nervousness?

  "He was a brisk, ramrod efficient man," she explained, "probably unmarried, with a military career, and all the insecurity that implies. He was in his fifties, and feeling odd about it. He walked into the bar where we were supposed to meet; his eyes narrowed,

  then opened, his hand was resting against his leg, and the fingers suddenly curled, then straightened, his pace slowed as he came in, but quickened by the time he was three steps toward me, and he shook my hand like he was afraid it would break."

  T'mwarba's smile turned into laughter. "He fell in love with you!"

  She nodded.

  "But why in the world should that upset you? I think you should be flattered."

  "Oh, I was!" She leaned forward. "I was flattered. And I could follow the whole thing through his head. Once, when he was trying to get his mind back on the code, Babel-17, I said exactly what he was thinking, just to let him know I was so close to him. I watched the thought go by that perhaps I was reading his mind—"

  "Wait a minute. This is the part I don't understand. How did you know exactly what he was thinking?"

  She raised her hand to her jaw. "He told me here. I said something about needing more information to crack the language. He didn't want to give it to me. I said I had to have it or I couldn't get any farther, it was that simple. He raised his head just a fraction—to avoid shaking it. If he had shaken his head, with a slight pursing of the lips, what do you think he would have been saying?"

  Dr. T'mwarba shrugged. "That it wasn't as simple as you thought?"

  "Yes. Now he made one gesture to avoid making that one. What does that mean?"

  T'mwarba shook his head.

  "He avoided the gesture because he connected its not being that simple with my being there. So he raised his head instead."

  "Something like: If it were that simple, we wouldn't need you," T'mwarba suggested.

  "Exactly. Now, while he raised his head, there was a slight pause halfway up. Don't you see what that adds?"

  "No."

  "If it were that simple—now the pause—if only it were that simple, we wouldn't have called you in about it." She turned her hands up in her lap. "And I said it back to him; then his jaw clenched—"

  "In surprise?"

  "—Yes. That's when he wondered for a second if I could read his mind."

  Dr. T'mwarba shook his head. "It's too exact, Rydra. What you're describing is muscle-reading, which can be pretty accurate, especially if you know the logical area the person's thoughts are centered on. But it's still too exact. Get back to why you were upset by the business. Your modesty was offended by the attentio
n of this . . . uncouth stellarman?"

  She came back with something neither modest nor couth.

  Dr. T'mwarba bit the inside of his-lip and wondered if she saw.

  "I'm not a little girl," she said. "Besides, he wasn't thinking anything uncouth. As I said, I was flattered by the whole thing. When I pulled my little joke, I was just trying to let him know how much in key we were. I thought he was charming. And if he had been able to see as clearly as I could he would have known I had nothing but good feeling for him. Only when he left—''

  Dr. T'mwarba heard roughness work back into her voice.

  "—when he left, the last thing he thought was, ‘She doesn't know; I haven't communicated a thing to her.' "

  Her eyes darkened—no, she bent slightly forward and half dropped her upper lids so that her eyes looked darker. He had watched that happen thousands of times since the scrawny autistic twelve year old girl had been sent to him for neuro-therapy, which had developed into psychotherapy, and then into friendship. This was the first time he'd understood the mechanics of the effect. Her precision of observation had inspired him before to look more closely at others. Only since therapy had officially ended had it come full circle and made him look more closely at her. What did the darkening signify other than change? He knew there were myriad marks of personality about him that she read with a microscope- Wealthy, worldly, he had known many people equal to her in reputation. The reputation did not awe him. Often she did."

  “He thought I didn't understand. He thought nothing had been communicated. And I was angry. I was hurt. All the misunderstandings that tie the world up and keep people apart were quivering before me at once, waiting for me to untangle them, explain them, and I couldn't. I didn't know the words, the grammar, the syntax. And—"

  Something else was happening in her Oriental face, and he strained to catch it. "Yes?"

  "The language?"

  "Yes. You know what I used to call my 'knack'?"

  "You mean you suddenly understood the language?"

  "Well, General Forester had just told me what I had was not a monologue, but a dialogue, which I hadn't known before. That fit in with some other things I had in the back of my mind. I realized I could tell where the voices changed myself. And then—"