Babel-17

by Samuel R. Delany

  "My report, which you should find satisfactory, was mailed last night and is on your desk at Administrative Alliance Headquarters—or will be in an hour."

  "Oh. I see,"

  She smiled. "You'll have to go shortly. We take off in a few minutes."

  "Yes. Actually, I'm taking off the Administrative Alliance Headquarters myself this morning, so I was here at the field, and I'd already gotten a synopsis of your report by stellarphone a few minutes ago, and I just wanted to say—" and he said nothing.

  "General Forester, once I wrote a poem I'm reminded of. It was called 'Advice to Those Who Would Love Poets'."

  The General opened his teeth without separating his lips.

  "It started something like:

  Young man, she will gnaw out your tongue.

  Lady, he will steal your hands . . .

  You can read the rest. It's in my second book. If you're not willing to lose a poet seven times a day, it's frustrating as hell."

  He said simply: "You knew I . . ."

  "I knew and I know. And I'm glad."

  The lost breath returned and an unfamiliar thing was happening to his face: he smiled. "When I was a private. Miss Wong, and we'd be confined to barracks, we'd talk about girls and girls and girls. And somebody would say about one: she was so pretty she didn't have to give me any, just promise me some." He let the stiffness leave his shoulders a moment, and though they actually fell half an inch, the effect was that they seemed broader by two. "That's what I was feeling."

  "Thank you for telling me," she said, "I like you, General. And I promise I'll still like you the next time I see you."

  "I. . . thank you. I guess that's all. Just thank you ... for knowing and promising." Then he said, "I have to go now, don't I?"

  "We'll be taking off in ten minutes."

  "Your letter," he said, "I’ll mail it for you."

  "Thanks." She handed it to him, he took her hand, and for the slightest moment with the slightest pressure, held her. Then he turned, left. Minutes later she watched his saucer-sled glide across the concrete, its sun-side flaring suddenly as light blistered the east.

  PART TWO: VER DORCO

  ... If words are paramount I am afraid that words are

  all my hands have ever seen ...

  —from Quartet.

  I

  The retranscribed material passed on the sorting screen. By the computer console laid the four pages of definitions she had amassed and a cuaderno full of grammatical speculations. Chewing her lower lip, she ran through the frequency tabulation of depressed diphthongs. On the wall she had tacked three charts labeled:

  Possible Phonemic Structure . . .

  Probable Phonetic Structure . . .

  Siotic, Semantic, and Syntactic Ambiguities . . .

  The last contained the problems to be solved. The questions, formulated and answered, were transferred as certainties of the first two.

  "Captain?"

  She turned on the bubble seat.

  Hanging from the entrance hatch by his knees was Diavalo.

  "Yes?"

  "What you want for dinner?" The little cook was a boy of seventeen. Two cosmetic surgical horns jutted from shocked, albino hair. He was scratching one ear with the tip of his tail.

  Rydra shrugged. "No preferences. Check around with the rest of the platoon."

  "Those guys'll eat liquefied organic waste if I give it to them. No imagination. Captain. What about pheasant under glass, or maybe rock Cornish game hen?"

  "You're in the mood for poultry?"

  "Well—" He released the bar with one knee and kicked the wall so he swung back and forth. “I could go for something birdy."

  "If nobody objects, try coq au vin, baked Idahos, and broiled beefsteak tomatoes."

  "Now you're cookin'!"

  "Strawberry shortcake for dessert?"

  Diavalo snapped his fingers and swung up toward the hatch. Rydra laughed and turned back to the console.

  "Reisling on the coq, May wine with the meal.'' The pink-eyed face was gone.

  Rydra had discovered the third example of what might have been syncope when the bubble chair sagged back. The cuardemo slammed against the ceiling. She would have, too, had she not grabbed the edge of the desk. Her shoulders wrenched. Behind her the skin of the bubble chair split and showered suspended silicon.

  The cabin stilled and she turned to see Diavalo spin through the hatch and crack his hip as he grabbed at the transparent wall.

  Jerk.

  She slipped on the wet, deflated skin of the bubble chair. The Slug's face jounced on the intercom. "Captain!"

  "What the hell . . .'"she demanded.

  The blinker from Drive Maintenance was flashing. Something jarred the ship again.

  "Are we still breathing?"

  "Just a . . ." The Slug's face, heavy and rimmed with a thin black beard, got an unpleasant expression. "Yes, Air; all right. Drive Maintenance has the problem."

  "If those damn kids have . . ." She clicked them on.

  Flop, the Maintenance Foreman, said, "Jesus, Captain, something blew."

  "What?"

  "I don't know." Flop's face appeared over his shoulder.

  "A and B shifters are all right. C's glittering like a Fourth of July sparkler. Where the hell are we, anyway?"

  “On the first hour shift between Earth and Luna. We haven't even got free of Stellarcenter-9. Navigation?" Another click.

  Mollya's dark face popped up.

  "Wie gehts?" demanded Rydra.

  The first Navigator reeled off their probability curve and located them between two vague logarithmic spirals -- "We're orbiting Earth so far," Ron's voice cut over. "Something knocked us way off course. We don't have any drive power and we're just drifting."

  "How high up and how fast?'.'

  "Calli's trying to find out now."

  "I'm going to take a look around outside." She called down to the Sensory Detail. "Nose, that does it smell like out there?"

  "It stinks. Nothing in this range. We've hit soup."

  "Can you hear anything. Ear?"

  "Not a peep. Captain. All the stasis currents in this area are at a standstill. We're too near a large gravitational mass. There's a faint ethric undertow about fifty spectres K-ward. But I don't think it will take us anywhere except around in a circle. We're riding on momentum from the last stiff wind from Earth's mango sphere."

  "What's it look like. Eyes?"

  "Inside of a coal scuttle. Whatever happened to us, we picked a dead spot to have it happen in. In my range that undertow is a little stronger and might move us into a good tide."

  Brass cut in. "But I'd like to know where it's going before I went jumping off into it. That means I gotta know where we are, first."

  "Navigation?"

  Silence for a moment. Then the three faces appeared. Calli said, "We don't know. Captain."

  The gravity field had stabilized a few degrees off. The silicon suspension collected in one comer. Little Diavalo shook his head and blinked. Through the contortion of pain on his face he whispered, "What happened, Captain?"

  “Damned if I know, "Rydra said. "But I'm going to find out."

  Dinner was eaten silently. The platoon, all kids under twenty-one, made as little noise as possible. At the officers' table the Navigators sat across from the apparitional figures of the discorporate Sensory Observers, The hefty Slug at the table's head poured wine for

  the silent crew. Rydra dined with Brass.

  "I don't know." He shook his maned head, turning his glass in gleaming claws. "It was smooth sailing with nothing in the way. Whatever happened, happened inside the ship."

  Diavalo, hip in a pressure bandage, dourfully brought in the shortcake, served Rydra and Brass, then retired to his seat at the platoon table.

  "So," Rydra said, "we're orbiting Earth with all our instruments knocked out and can't even tell where we are."

  "The hyperstasis instruments are good," he reminded her. "We just don't kno
w where we are on this side of the jum'."

  "And we can't jump if we don't know where we're jumping from." She looked over the dining room. "Do you think they're expecting to get out of this. Brass?"

  "They're ho'ing you can get them out, Ca'tain."

  She touched the rim of her glass to her lower lip.

  “If somebody doesn't, we'll sit here eating Diavalo's good food for six months, then suffocate. We can't even get a signal out until after we lea’ for hy’erstasis with the regular communicator shorted. I asked the Navigators to see if they could im’rovise something, but no go. They just had time to see that we were launched in a great circle."

  "We should have windows," Rydra said, "At least we could look out at the stars and time our orbit. It can't be more than a couple of hours."

  Brass nodded. "Shows you what modern conveniences mean. A 'orthote and an old-fashioned sextant could get us right, but we're electronicized to the gills, and here we sit, with a neatly insoluble 'roblem."

  "Circling—"Rydra put down her wine.

  "What is it?"

  "Der Kreis," said Rydra. She frowned.

  "What's that?" asked Brass.

  "Ratas, orbis, Ucerchio." She put her palms flat on the tabletop and pressed. "Circles," she said. "Circles in different languages!"

  Brass' confusion was terrifying through his fangs. The glinting fleece above his eyes bristled.

  "Sphere," she said, "il gtobo, gumlas." She stood up. "Kule, kuglet, kring!"

  "Does it matter what language it's in? A circle is a cir—''

  But she was laughing, running from the dining room.

  In her cabin she grabbed up her translation. Her eyes fled down the pages. She banged the button for the Navigators. Ron, wiping whipped-cream from his mouth, said, "Yes, Captain? What do you want?"

  "A watch," said Rydra, "and a—bag of marbles!"

  "Huh?" asked Calli.

  "You can finish your shortcake later. Meet me in G-center right now."

  "Mar-bles?" articulated Mollya wonderingly. "Marbles?"

  "One of the kids in the platoon must have brought along a bag of marbles. Get it and meet me in G-center."

  She jumped over the ruined skin of the bubble seat and leapt up the hatchway, turned off at the radial shaft seven, and launched down the cylindrical corridor toward the hollow spherical chamber of G-center. The calculated center of gravity of the ship, it was a chamber thirty feet in diameter in constant free fall where certain gravity-sensitive instruments took their readings. A moment later the three Navigators appeared through the diametric entrance- Ron held up a mesh bag of glass balls. "Lizzy asks you to try and get these back to her by tomorrow afternoon because she's been challenged by the kids in Drive and she wants to keep her championship."

  "If this works she can probably have them back tonight."

  "Work?" Mollya wanted to know. "Idea you?"

  "I do. Only it's not really my idea."

  "Whose is it, and what is it?" Ron asked.

  "I suppose it belongs to somebody who speaks another language- What we've got to do is arrange the marbles around the wall of the room in a perfect sphere, and then sit back with the clock and keep tabs on the second hand."

  "What for?" asked Calli.

  "To see where they go and how long it takes them to get there."

  "I don't get it," said Ron.

  "Our orbit tends toward a great circle about the Earth, right? That means everything in the ship is also tending to orbit in a great circle, and, if left free of influence, will automatically seek out such a path."

  "Right. So what?"

  "Help me get these marbles in place," Rydra said. "These things have iron cores. Magnetize the walls, will you, to hold them in place, so they can all be released at once." Ron, confused, went to power the metal walls of the spherical chamber. "You still don't see? You're mathematicians, tell me about great circles."

  Calli took a handful of marbles and started to space them—tiny click after click—over the wall. "A great circle is the largest circle you can cut through a sphere."

  “The diameter of the great circle equals the diameter of the sphere," from Ron, as he came back from the power switch.

  "The summation of the angles of intersection of any three great circles within one topologically contained shape approaches five hundred and forty degrees. The summation of the angles of N great circles approaches N times one hundred and eighty degrees." Mollya intoned the definitions, which she had begun memorizing in English with the help of a personafix that morning, with her musically inflected voice. “Marbles here, yes?"

  "All over, yes. Even as you can space them, but they don't have to be exact. Tell me some more about the intersections."

  "Well," said Ron, "on any given sphere all great circles intersect each other—or lie congruent."

  Rydra laughed. "Just like that, hey? Are there any other circles on a sphere that have to intersect no matter how you maneuver them?"

  "I think you can push around any other circles so that they're equidistant at all points and don't touch. All great circles have to have at least two points in common."

  'Think about that for a minute and look at these marbles, all being pulled along great circles."

  Mollya suddenly floated back from the wall with an expression of recognition and brought her hands together. She blurted something in Kiswahili, and Rydra laughed. "That's right," she said. To Ron's and Calli's bewilderment she translated: "They'll move toward each other and their paths'll intersect."

  Calli's eyes widened. "That's right, at exactly a quarter of the way around our orbit, they should have flattened out to a circular plane."

  "Lying along the plane of our orbit," Ron finished.

  Mollya frowned and made a stretching motion with her hands. "Yeah," Ron said, "a distorted circular plane with a tail at each end, from which we can compute which way the earth lies."

  "Clever, huh?" Rydra moved back into the corridor opening. "I figure we can do this once, then fire our rockets enough to blast us maybe seventy or eighty mites either up or down without hurting anything. From that we can get the length of our orbit, as well as our speed. That'll be all the information we need to locate ourselves in relation to the nearest major gravitational influence. From there we can jump stasis- All our communications instruments for stasis are in working order. We can signal for help and pull in some replacements from a stasis station."

  The amazed Navigators joined her in the corridor. "Count down," Rydra said.

  At zero Ron released the magnetic walls. Slowly the spheres began to drift away, lining up slowly.

  "Guess you learn something every day," Calli said. "If you'd asked me, I would have said we were stuck here forever. And knowing things like this is supposed to be my job. Where did you get the idea?"

  "From the word for 'great circle' in ... another language."

  “Language speaking tongue?'' Mollya asked. “You mean?"

  "Well," Rydra took out a metal tracing plate and a stylus. "I'm simplifying it a little, but let me show you." She marked the plate. "Let's say the word for circle is: 0. This language has a melody system to illustrate comparatives. We'll represent this by the diacritical marks: v - " , respectively smallest, ordinary, and biggest. So what would 0 mean?"

  "Smallest possible circle?" said Calli. "That's a single point."

  Rydra nodded. “Now, when referring to a circle on a sphere, suppose the word for just an ordinary circle is O followed by either of two symbols, one of which means not touching anything else, the other of which means crossing—11 or X. What would OX mean?"

  "Great circles that intersect,” said Ron.

  "And because all great circles intersect, in this language the word for great circle is always OX. It carries the information right in the word. Just like busstop or foxhole carry information in English that la gare or Ie terrier—comparable words in French—lack. 'Great

  Circle' carries some information with it, but not the right infor
mation to get us out of the jam we're in. We have to go to another language in order to think about the problem clearly without going through all sorts of roundabout paths for the proper aspects of what we want to deal with."

  "What language is this?" asked Calli.

  "I don't know its real name. For now it's called Babel-17. From what little I know about it already, most of its words carry more information about things they refer to than any four or five languages I know put together, and in less space." She gave a brief translation for Mollya.

  "Who speak?" Mollya asked, determined to stick to her minimal English.

  Rydra bit the inside of her lip. When she asked herself that question, her stomach would tighten, her hands start toward something and the yearning for an answer grow nearly to pain in the back of her throat. It happened now; it faded. "I don't know. But I wish I did. That's what the main reason for this trip is, to find out."

  "Babel-17," Ron repeated.

  One of the platoon tube-boys coughed behind them.

  "What is it, Carlos?"

  Squat, taurine, with a lot of curly black hair, Carlos had big, loose muscles, and a slight hiss. "Captain, could I show you something?" He shifted from side to side in adolescent awkwardness, scuffing his bare soles, heat-callused from climbing over the drive tubes, against the doorsill. "Something down in the tubes. I think you should take a look at it yourself."

  "Did Slug tell you to get me?"

  Carlos prodded behind his ear with a gnawed thumbnail. "Um-hm."

  "You three can take care of this business, can't you?"

  "Sure, Captain." Calli looked at the closing marbles.

  Rydra ducked after Carlos. They rode down the ladderlift and hunched through the low ceilinged causeway.

  "Down here," Carlos said, hesitantly taking the lead beneath arched bus bars. At a mesh platform he stopped and opened a component cabinet in the wall. "See." He removed a board of printed circuits. "There." A thin crack ran across the plastic surface. "It's been broken."

  "How?" Rydra asked.

  "Like this." He took the plate in both hands and made a bending gesture.

  "Sure it didn't crack by itself?"