Babel-17

by Samuel R. Delany

  "I don't understand.

  “Take your Navigator. He likes his drinks big and all the hors d'oeuvres except the anchovies. That's more than I know about the likes and dislikes of anyone else in the room. You offer Scotch, they drink Scotch. You offer tequila, tequila they down by the gallon. And just a moment ago I discovered"—she shook her supine hand—"that it's all in the wrist. I never knew that before."

  "We're used to talking to each other."

  "Yes, but you tell the important things. What you like, what you don't like, how to do things. Do you really want to be introduced to all those stuffy men and women who kill people?"

  "Not really."

  "Didn't think so. And I don't want to bother myself. Oh, there are three or four who I think you would like. But I'll see that you meet them before you leave." And she barreled into the crowd.

  Tides, Rydra thought. Oceans, Hyperstasis currents. Or the movement of people in a large room. She drifted along the least resistant ways that pulsed open, then closed as someone moved to meet someone, to get a drink, to leave a conversation.

  Then there was a corner, a spiral stair. She climbed, pausing as she came around the second turn to watch the crowd beneath. There was a double door ajar at the top, a breeze. She stepped outside.

  Violet had been replaced by artful, cloud-streaked purple. Soon the planetoid's chromadome would simulate night. Moist vegetation lipped the railing. At one end, the vines had completely covered the white stone.

  "Captain?"

  Ron, shadowed and brushed with leaves, sat in the comer of the balcony, hugging his knees. Skin is not silver, she thought, yet whenever I see him that way, curled up in himself, I picture a knot of white metal. He lifted his chin from his kneecaps and put his back against the verdant hedge so there were leaves in his com-silk hair.

  "What're you doing?"

  “Too many people."

  She nodded, watching him press his shoulders downward, watching his triceps leap on the bone, then still. With each breath in the gnarled, young body the tiny movements sang to her. She listened to the singing for nearly half a minute while he watched her, sitting still, yet always the tiny entrancements. The rose on his shoulder whispered against the leaves. When she had listened to the muscular music a while, she asked:

  "Trouble between you, Mollya, and Calli?"

  "No. I mean . . . just . . ."

  "Just what?" She smiled and leaned on the balcony edge.

  He lowered his chin to his knees again. "I guess they're fine. But, I'm the youngest . . . and . . ." Suddenly the shoulders raised. "How the hell would you understand! Sure, you know about things like this, but you don't really know. You write what you see. Not what you do." It came out in little explosions of half whispered sound. She heard the words and watched the jaw muscle jerk and beat and pop a small beast inside his cheek. "Perverts," he said. "That's what you Customs all really think. The Baron and the Baroness, all those people in there staring at us, who can't understand why you could want more than two- And you can't understand either."

  "Ron?"

  He snapped his teeth on a leaf and yanked it from the stem.

  "Five years ago, Ron, I was . . . tripled."

  The face turned to her as if pulling against a spring, then yanked back. He spit the leaf. "You're Customs, Captain. You circle-Transport, but just the way you let them eat you up with their eyes, the way they turn and watch to see who you are when you walk by: you're a Queen, yeah, but a Queen in Customs. You're not Transport."

  "Ron, I'm public. That's why they look. I write books. Customs people read them, yes, but they look because they want to know who the hell wrote them. Customs didn't write them. I talk to Customs and Customs looks at me and says: 'You're Transport.'" She shrugged. "I'm neither. But even so, I was tripled. I know about that."

  "Customs don't triple," he said.

  "Two guys and myself. If I ever do it again it'll be with a girl and a guy. For me that would be easier, I think. But I was tripled for three years. That's over twice as long as you've been.

  "Yours didn't stick, then. Ours did. At least it was sticking together with Cathy."

  "One was killed," Rydra said. "One is in suspended animation at Hippocrates General waiting for them to discover a cure for Caulder's disease. I don't think it will be in my lifetime, but if it is—" In the silence he turned to her. "What is it?" she asked.

  "Who were they?"

  "Customs or Transport?" She shrugged. "Like me, neither really. Fobo Lombs, he was captain of an interstellar transport; he was the one who made me go through and get my Captain's papers. Also he worked planetside doing hydroponics research, working on storage methods for hyperstatic hauls. Who was he? He was slim and blond and wonderfully affectionate and drank too much sometimes, and would come back from a trip and get drunk and in a fight and in jail, and we'd bail him out—really it only happened twice—but we teased him with it for a year. And he didn't like to sleep in the middle of the bed because he always wanted to let one arm hang over."

  Ron laughed, and his hands, grasping high on his forearms, slid to his wrists.

  “He was killed in a cave-in exploring the Ganymede Catacombs during the second summer that the three of us worked together on the Jovian Geological Survey.''

  "Like Cathy," Ron said, after a moment.

  "Muels Aranlyde was—"

  "Empire Star!" Ron said, his eyes widening, "and the 'Comet Jo' books! You were tripled with Muels Aranlyde?''

  She nodded.' Those books were a lot of fun, weren' t they?"

  "Hell, I musfve read all of them," Ron said. His knees came apart. "What sort of a guy was he? Was he anything like Comet?"

  "As a matter of fact, Comet Jo started out to be Fobo. Fobo would get involved in something or other, I'd get upset, and Muels would start another novel."

  "You mean they're like true stories?"

  She shook her head. "Most of the books are just all the fantastic things that could have happened, or that we worried might have happened. Muels himself? In the books he always disguises himself as a computer. He was dark, and withdrawn, and incredibly patient and incredibly kind. He showed me all about sentences and paragraphs—did you know the emotional unit in writing is the paragraph?—and how to separate what you can say from what you can imply, and when to do one or the other—"She stopped. "Then he'd give me a manuscript and say, ‘Now you tell me what's wrong with the words.' The only thing I could ever find was that there were too many of them. It was just after Fobo was killed that I really got down to my poetry. Muels used to tell me if I ever would, I'd be great because I knew so much about its elements to start. I had to get down to something then, because Fobo was . . . but you know about that, though. Muels caught Caulder's disease about four months later. Neither one of them saw my first book, though they'd seen most of the poems. Maybe someday Muels will read them. He might even write some more of Comet's adventures— and maybe even go to the Morgue and call back my thinking pattern and ask, ‘Now you tell me what's wrong with the words'; and I'll be able to tell him so much more, so much. But there won't be any consciousness left . . ." She felt herself drift toward the dangerous emotions, let them get as close as they would. Dangerous or not, it had been three years since her emotions had scared her too much to watch them.

  " . . .so much more." Ron sat cross-legged now, forearms on his knees, hands hanging, "Empire Star and Comet Jo; we had so much fun with those stories, whether it was arguing about them all night over coffee, or correcting galleys, or sneaking into bookshops and pulling them out from behind the other books."

  "I used to do that, too," Ron said. "But just "cause I liked them."

  "We even had fun arguing about who was going to sleep in the middle."

  It was like a cue. Ron began to pull back together, knees rising, arms locking around them, chin down. "I got both of mine, at least," he said. "I guess I should be pretty happy."

  "Maybe you should. Maybe you shouldn't. Do they love you?"

/>   "They say so."

  "Do you love them?"

  "Christ, yes. I talk to Mollya and she's trying to explain something to me and she still don't talk so good yet, but suddenly I figure out what she means, and . . ." He straightened his body and looked up as though the word he was searching for was someplace high.

  "It's wonderful," she supplied.

  "Yeah, it's—"He looked at her. "It's wonderful."

  "You and CalIi?"

  "Hell, Calli's just a big old bear and I can tumble him around and play with him. But it's him and Mollya. He still can't understand her so well. And because I'm the youngest, he thinks he should learn quicker than me. And he doesn't, so he keeps away from both of us. Now like I say, when he gets in a mood, I can always handle him. But she's new, and thinks he's mad at her."

  "Want to know what to do?" Rydra asked, after a moment.

  "Do you know?"

  She nodded. "It hurts more when there's something wrong between them because there doesn't seem to be anything you can do. But it's easier to fix."

  "Why?"

  "Because they love you."

  He was waiting now.

  "Calli gets into one of his moods, and Mollya doesn't know how to get through to him."

  Ron nodded.

  "Mollya speaks another language, and Calli can't get through that."

  He nodded again.

  "Now you can communicate with both of them. You can't act as a go-between; that never works. But you can teach each of them how to do what you know already."

  "Teach?"

  "What do you do with Calli when he gets moody?"

  "I pull his ears," Ron said. "He tells me to cut it out until he starts laughing, and then I roll him around on the floor."

  Rydra made a face. "It's unorthodox, but if it works, fine. Now show Mollya how. She's athletic. Let her practice on you till she gets it right, if you have to."

  "I don't like to get my ears pulled," Ron said.

  "Sometimes you have to make sacrifices." She tried not to smile and smiled anyway.

  Ron rubbed his left earlobe with the ham of his thumb. "I guess so."

  "And you have to teach Calli the words to get through to Mollya."

  "But I don't know the words myself, sometimes. I can just guess better than he can."

  "If he knew the words, would it help?"

  "Sure.”

  "I've got a Kiswahili grammar in my cabin. Pick it up when we get back to the ship."

  "Hey, that would be fine—" He stopped, withdrawing just a bit into the leaves. "Only Calli don't read much or anything."

  "You'll help him."

  "Teach him," Ron said.

  'That's right."

  "Do you think he'll do it?" Ron asked.

  "To get closer to Mollya?" asked Rydra. "Do you think so?"

  "He will." Like metal unbending, Ron suddenly stood. "He will."

  "Are you going inside now?" she asked. "We'll be eating in a few minutes."

  Ron turned to the rail and looked at the vivid sky. "They keep a beautiful shield up here."

  "To keep from being burned up by Bellatrix," Rydra said.

  "So they don't have to think about what they're doing."

  Rydra raised her eyebrows. Still the concern over right and wrong, even amidst domestic confusion. "That, too," she said and wondered about the war.

  His tensing back told her he would come later, wanted to think some more. She went through the double doors and started down the staircase.

  "I saw you go out, and I thought I'd wait for you to come back in."

  Deja vu, she thought. But she couldn't have seen him before in her life. Blue-black hair over a face craggy for its age in the late twenties. He stepped back to make way for her on the stairway with an incredible economy of movement. She looked from hands to face for a gesture revealing something. He watched her back, giving nothing; then he turned and nodded toward the people below. He indicated the Baron, who stood alone toward the middle of the room. "Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look."

  "I wonder how hungry he is?" Rydra said, and felt strange again.

  The Baroness was churning toward her husband through the crowd, to ask advice about whether to begin dinner or wait another five minutes, or some other equally desperate decision.

  “What must a marriage between two people like that be?" the stranger asked with austerely patronizing amusement.

  "Comparatively simple, I suppose," Rydra said. "They've just got each other to worry about."

  A polite look of inquiry. When she offered no elucidation, the stranger turned back to the crowd. "They make such odd faces when they glance up here to see if it's you, Miss Wong."

  "They leer," she said, shortly.

  "Bandicoots. That's what they look like. A pack of them."

  "I wonder if their artificial sky makes them seem so sickly?" She felt herself leaking a controlled hostility.

  He laughed. "Bandicoots with thalassanemia!"

  "I guess so. You're not from the Yards?" His complexion had a life that would have faded under the artificial sky.

  "As a matter of fact, I am."

  Surprised, she would have asked him more, but the loudspeakers suddenly announced: "Ladies and Gentlemen, dinner is served."

  He accompanied her down the stairs, but two or three steps into the crowd she discovered he had disappeared. She continued toward the dining room alone.

  Under the arch the Baron and Baroness waited for her. As the Baroness took her arm, the chamber orchestra on the dais fell to their instruments.

  "Come, we're down this way."

  She kept near the puffy matron through the people milling about the serpentine table that curved and twisted back on itself.

  "We're over there."

  And the Basque message: Captain, on your transcriber, something's coming over back on the ship. The small explosion in her mind stopped her.

  "Babel-17!"

  The Baron turned to her. "Yes, Captain Wong?" She watched uncertainty score tense lines on his face.

  "Is- there any place in the yards with particularly important materials or research going on that might be unguarded now?"

  "That's all done automatically. Why?"

  "Baron, there's a sabotage attack about to take place, or taking place right now."

  "But how did you—"

  "I can't explain now, but you'd better make sure everything is all right."

  And the tension turned.

  The Baroness touched her husband's arm, and said with sudden coolness. "Felix, there's your seat."

  The Baron pulled out his chair, sat down, and unceremoniously pushed aside his place setting. There was a control panel beneath his doily. As people seated themselves, Rydra saw Brass, twenty feet away, lower himself on the special hammock that had been set up for his glittering, gigantic bulk.

  "You sit here, my dear. We'll simply go on with the party as if nothing was happening. I think that's best."

  Rydra seated herself next to the Baron, and the Baroness lowered herself carefully to the chair on her left. The Baron was whispering into a throat microphone- Pictures, which she was at the wrong angle to see clearly, flashed on the eight inch screen. He looked up long enough to say, "Nothing yet. Captain Wong.''

  "Ignore what he's doing," the Baron said. "This is much more interesting over here."

  Into her lap she swung out a small console from where it had hung beneath the table edge.

  "Ingenious little thing," the Baroness continued, looking around. "I think we're ready. There!" Her pudgy forefinger struck at one of the buttons, and lights about the room began to lower. "I control the whole meal just by pressing the right one at the right time. Watch!" She struck at another one.

  Along the center of the table now, under the gentled light, panels opened and great platters of fruit, candied apples and sugared grapes, halved melons filled with honeyed nuts, rose up before the guests.

  "And wine!" said the Baroness, reaching down again.


  Along the hundreds of feet of table, basins rose. Sparkling froth foamed the brim as the fountain mechanism began. Spurting liquid streamed.

  "Fill your glass, dear. Drink up," prompted the Baroness, raising 'her own beneath a jet; the crystal splashed with purple.

  On her right the Baron said: 'The Arsenal seems to be all right. I'm alerting all the special projects. You're sure this sabotage attack is going on right now?"

  "Either right now," she told him, "or within the next two or three minutes. It might be an explosion, or some major piece of equipment may fail."

  "That doesn't leave me much to go on. Though communications had picked up your Babel-17. I've been alerted to how these attempts run."

  "Try one of these. Captain Wong," The Baroness handed her a quartered mango which Rydra discovered, when she tasted it, had been marinated in Kirsch.

  Nearly all the guests were seated now. She watched a platoon kid, named Mike, searching for his name-card halfway across the hall. And down the table length she saw the stranger who had stopped her on the spiral stair hurrying toward them behind the seated guests.

  "The wine is not grape, but plum," the Baroness said. "A little heavy to start with, but so good with fruit. I'm particularly proud of the strawberries. The legumes are a hydroponicist's nightmare, you know, but this year we were able to get such lovely ones."

  Mike found his seat and reached both hands into the fruit bowl. The stranger rounded the last loop of table. Calli was holding a goblet of wine in each hand, looking from one to the other, probably trying to determine the larger.

  "I could be a tease," the Baroness said, "and bring out the sherbets first. Or do you think I ought best to go to the caldo verde? The way I prepare it, it's very light. I can never decide—"

  The stranger reached the Baron, leaned over his shoulder to watch the screen, and whispered something. The Baron turned to him, turned back slowly with both hands on the table—and fell forward! A trickle of blood wormed from beneath his face.

  Rydra jerked back in her chair. Murder. A mosaic came together in her head, and when it was together, it said: murder. She leapt up.