Babel-17

by Samuel R. Delany

  The Baroness exhaled hoarse breath and rose, overturning her chair. She flapped her hands hysterically toward her husband and shook her head.

  Rydra whirled to see the stranger snatch a vibra-gun from beneath his jacket. She yanked the Baroness out of the way. The shot was low and struck the console.

  Once moved, the Baroness staggered to her husband and grasped him. Her breathy moan took voice and became a wail. The hulking form, like a blimp deflating, sank and pulled Felix Ver Dorco's body from the table, till she was kneeling on the floor, holding him in her arms, rocking him gently, screaming.

  Guests had risen now; talk became roaring.

  With the console smashed, along the table the fruit platters were pushed aside by emerging peacocks, cooked, dressed, and reassembled with sugared heads, tail feathers swaying. None of the clearing mechanisms were operating. Tureens of caldo verde crowded the wine basins till both overturned, flooding the table. Fruit rolled over the edge.

  Through the voices, the vibra-gun hissed on her left, left again, then right. People ran from their chairs, blocked her view. She heard the gun once more and saw Dr. Crane double over, to be caught by a surprised neighbor as her bleached hair came undone and tumbled her face.

  Spitted lambs rose to upset the peacocks. Feathers swept the floor. Wine fountains spurted the glistening amber skins which hissed and steamed. Food fell back into the opening and struck red heating coils. Rydra smelled burning.

  She darted forward, caught the arm of the fat, black-bearded man. "Slug, get the kids out of here!"

  "What do you think I'm doing. Captain?"

  She darted away, came up against a length of table, and vaulted the steaming pit. The intricate, oriental dessert—sizzling bananas dipped first in honey then rolled to the plate over a ramp of crushed ice—was emerging as she sprang. The sparkling confections shot across the ramp and dropped to the floor, honey crystallized to glittering thorns. They rolled among the guests, cracked underfoot. People slipped and flailed and fell.

  "Snazzy way to slide on a banana, huh. Captain?" commented Calli. "What's going on?"

  "Get Mollya and Ron back to the ship!"

  Ums rose now, struck the rotisserie arrangement, overturned, and grounds and boiling coffee splattered. A woman shrieked, clutching her scalded arm.

  "This ain't no fun anymore," Calli said. "I'll round them up."

  He started away as Slug hurried back the other way. “Slug, what's a bandicoot?'' She caught his arm again.

  "Vicious little animal. Marsupial, I think. Why?"

  “That’s right. I remember now. And thalassanemia?"

  "Funny time to ask. Some sort of anemia."

  "I know that. What sort? You're the medic on the ship."

  "Let me see." He closed his eyes a moment. "I got all this once in a hypno-course. Yeah, I remember. It's hereditary, the Caucasian equivalent of sickle cell anemia, where the red blood cells collapse because the haptoglobins break down—"

  "—and allow the hemoglobins to leak out and the cell gets crushed by osmotic pressure. I've figured it out. Get the hell out of here."

  Puzzled, the Slug started toward the arch. Rydra started after him, slipped in wine sherbet, and grabbed Brass, who now gleamed above her. "Take it easy, Ca'tain!"

  "Out of here, baby," she demanded. "And fast."

  "Ho' a ride?" Grinning, he hooked his arm at his hip, and she climbed to his back, clutching his sides with her knees and holding his shoulders. The great muscles that had defeated the Silver Dragon bunched beneath her, and he leapt, clearing the table and landing on all fours. Before the fanged, golden beast, guests scattered. They made for the arched door.

  V

  Hysterical exhaustion frothed in her head.

  She smashed through it, into the Rimbaud's cabin, and punched the intercom. "Slug, is every—"

  "All present and accounted for. Captain."

  "The discorporate—"

  "Safe aboard, all three."

  Brass, panting, filled the entrance hatch behind her.

  She switched to another channel, and a near musical sound filled the room- "Good. It's still going."

  "That's it?" asked Brass.

  She nodded. "Babel-l7. It's been automatically transcribed so I can study it later. Anyway, here goes nothing." She threw a switch.

  "What you doing?"

  "I prerecorded some messages and I'm sending them out now. Maybe they'll get through." She stopped the first take and started a second. "I don't know it well, yet. I know it a little, but not enough. I feel like someone at a performance of Shakespeare shouting catcalls in pidgin English."

  An outside line signaled for her attention. "Captain Wong, this is Albert VerDorco." The voice was perturbed. "We've had a terrible catastrophe, and we're in total confusion here. I could not find you at my brother's, but flight clearance just told me you had requested immediate take off for hyperstasis jump."

  "1 requested nothing of the kind. I just wanted to get my crew out of there. Have you found out what's going on?"

  "But, Captain, they said you were in the process of clearing for flight. You have top priority, so I can't very well countermand your order. But I called to request that you please stay until this matter is cleared up, unless you are acting on some information that—"

  "We're not taking off," Rydra said.

  "We better not be," interjected Brass. "I'm not wired into the ship yet."

  "Apparently your automatic James Bond ran berserk," Rydra told Ver Dorco.

  "... Bond?"

  "A mythological reference. Forgive me. TW-55 flipped."

  "Oh, yes. I know. It assassinated my brother, and four extremely important officials. It couldn't have picked out four more key figures if it had been planned."

  "It was. TW-55 was sabotaged. And no, I don't know how. I suggest you contact General Forester back at—"

  "Captain, flight clearance says you're still signaling for take off! I have no official authority here, but you must—"

  "Slug! Are we taking off?"

  "Why, yes. Didn't you just issue orders down here for emergency hyperstasis exit?"

  "Brass isn't even at his station yet, you idiot!"

  "But I have just received clearance from you thirty seconds ago. Of course he's hooked in. I just spoke—"

  Brass lumbered across the floor and bellowed into the microphone. "I'm standing right behind her, numbskull! What are you, gonna dive into the middle Bellatrix? Or maybe come out inside some nova? These things head for the biggest mass around when they drift!"

  "But you just—"

  A grinding started somewhere below them. And a sudden surge.

  Over the loudspeaker from Albert VerDorco “Captain Wong!"

  Rydra shouted again, "Idiot, cut the stasis gen—"

  But the generators were already whistling over the roar.

  And surge again; she jerked against her hands holding the desk edge, saw Brass flail one claw in the air.

  And—

  PART THREE: JEBEL TARIK

  Real, grimy and exiled, he eludes us.

  I would show him books and bridges.

  I would make a language we could alt speak.

  No blond fantasy

  Mother has sent to plague us in the Spring,

  he has his own bad dreams, needs work.

  Gets drunk, maybe would not have chosen to be beautiful . . .

  —from The Navigators

  . . You have imposed upon me a treaty of silence . . .

  —from The Song of Liadan

  I

  Abstract thoughts in a blue room; Nominative, genitive, etative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, illative, instructive, abessive, adessive, inessive, essive, allative, translative, comitative. Sixteen cases of the Finnish noun. Odd, some languages get by with only singular and plural. The American Indian languages even failed to distinguish number. Except Sioux, in which there was a plural only for animate objects. The blue room was round and warm
and smooth. No way to say warm in French. There was only hot and tepid If there's no word for it, how do you think about it? And, if there isn't the proper form, you don't have the how even if you have the words. Imagine, in Spanish having to assign a sex to every object: dog, table, tree, can-opener. Imagine, in Hungarian, not being able to assign a sex to anything: he, she, it all the same word. Thou art my friend, but you are my king; thus the distinctions of Elizabeth the First's English. But with some oriental languages, which all but dispense with gender and number, you are my friend, you are my parent, and YOU are my priest, and YOU are my king, and YOU are my servant, and YOU are my servant whom I'm going to fire tomorrow if YOU don't watch it, and YOU are my king whose policies I totally disagree with and have sawdust in YOUR head instead of brains, YOUR highness, and YOU may be my friend, but I'm still gonna smack YOU up side the head if YOU ever say that to me again;

  And who the hell are you anyway . . .?

  What's your name? She thought in a round warm blue room.

  Thoughts without a name in a blue room: Ursula, Priscilia, Barbara, Mary, Mona, and Natica: respectively, Bear, Old Lady, Chatterbox, Bitter, Monkey, and Buttock. Name. Names? What's in a name? What name am I in? In my father's father's land, his name would come first, Wong Rydra. In Mollya's home, I would not bear my father's name at all, but my mother's. Words are names for things. In Plato's time things were names for ideas—what better description of the Platonic Ideal? But were words names for things, or was that just a bit of semantic confusion? Words were symbols for whole categories of things, where a name was put to a single object: a name on something that requires a symbol jars, making humor. A symbol on something that takes a name jars, too: a memory that contained a torn window shade, his liquored breath, her outrage, and crumpled clothing wedged behind a chipped, cheap night table. "All right, woman, come here!" and she had whispered, with her hands achingly tight on the brass bar, "My name is Rydra!" An individual, a thing apart from its environment, and apart from all things in that environment; an individual was a type of thing for which symbols were inadequate, and so names were invented. I am invented. I am not a round warm blue room. I am someone in that room, I am—

  Her lids had been half-closed on her eyeballs. She opened them and came up suddenly against a restraining web. It knocked her breath out, and she fell back, turning about to look at the room.

  No.

  She didn't "look at the room."

  She "something at the something." The first something was a tiny vocable that implied an immediate, but passive, perception that could be aural or olfactory as well as visual. The second something was three equally tiny phonemes that blended at different musical pitches: one an indicator that fixed the size of the chamber at roughly twenty-five feet long and cubical, the second identifying the color and probable substance of the walls—some blue metal—while the third was at once a place holder for particles that should denote the room's function when she discovered it, and a sort of grammatical tag by which she could refer to the whole experience with only the one symbol for as long as she needed. All four sounds took less time on her tongue and in her mind than the one clumsy diphthong in 'room'. Babel-17; she had felt it before with other languages, the opening, the widening, the mind forced to sudden growth. But this, this was like the sudden focusing of a lens blurry for years.

  She sat up again. Function?

  What was the room used for? She rose slowly, and the web caught her around the chest. Some sort of infirmary. She looked down at the—not 'webbing', but rather a three particle vowel differential, each particle of which-defined one stress of the three-way tie, so that the weakest points in the mesh were identified when the total sound of the differential reached its lowest point. By breaking the threads at these points, she realized, the whole web would unravel. Had she flailed at it, and not named it in this new language, it would have been more than secure enough to hold her. The transition from 'memorized' to 'known' had taken place while she had been—

  Where had she been? Anticipation, excitement, fear! She pulled her mind back into English. Thinking in Babel-17 was like suddenly seeing the water at the bottom of a well that a moment ago you thought had only gone down a few feet. She reeled with vertigo.

  It took her a blink to register the others. Brass hung in the large hammock at the far wall—she saw the tines of one yellow claw over the rim. The two smaller ones on the other side must have been platoon kids. Above one edge she saw shiny black hair as a head turned in sleep:

  Carlos. She couldn't see the third. Curiosity made a small, unfriendly fist on something important in her lower abdomen.

  Then the wall faded.

  She had been about to try to fix herself, if not in place and hour, at least in some set of possibilities. With the fading wall, the attempt stopped. She watched.

  It happened in the upper part of the wall to her left. It glowed, grew transparent, and a tongue of metal formed in the air, sloped gently toward her.

  Three men:

  The closest, at the ramps, head, had a face like brown rock cut roughly and put together fast. He wore an outdated garment, the son that had preceded contour capes. It automatically formed to the body, but was made of porous plastic and looked rather like armor. A black, deep piled material cloaked one shoulder and arm. His worn sandals were laced high on his calves. Tufts of fur beneath the thongs prevented chafing. His only cosmetisurgury was false silver hair and upswept metallic eyebrows. From one distended earlobe hung a thick silver ring. He touched his vibra-gun holster resting on his stomach as he looked from hammock to hammock.

  The second man stepped in front. He was a slim, fantastic concoction of cosmetisurgical invention, sort of a griffin, sort of a monkey, sort of a sea horse: scales, feathers, claws and beak had been grafted to a body she was sure had originally resembled a cat's. He crouched at the first man's side, squatting on surgically distended haunches, brushing his knuckles on the metal flooring. He glanced up as the first man absently reached down to scratch his head.

  Rydra waited for them to speak. A word would release identification; Alliance or Invader. Her mind was ready to spring on whatever tongue they spoke, to extract what she knew of its thinking habits, tendencies toward logical ambiguities, absence or presence of verbal rigor, in whatever areas she might take advantage of—

  The second man moved back and she saw the third who still stood at the rear. Taller, and more powerfully built than the others, he wore only a breech, was mildly round-shouldered. Grafted onto his wrists and heels were cocks' spurs—they were sometimes sported by the lower elements of the transport underworld, and bore the same significance as brass knuckles or blackjacks of centuries past. His head had been recently shaved and the hair had started back in a dark, Elektra brush. Around one knotty bicep was a band of red flesh, like a blood bruise or inflamed scar. The brand had become so common on characters in mystery novels five years back, that now it had been nearly dropped as a hopeless cliché. It was a convict's mark from the penal caves of Titin. Something about him was brutal enough to make her glance away. Something was graceful enough to make her look back.

  The two on the head of the ramp turned to the third. She waited for words, to define, fix, identify. They looked at her, then walked into the wall. The ramp began to retract.

  She pushed herself up. "Please," she called out. "Where are we?"

  The silver-haired man said, "JebelTarik," The wall solidified,

  Rydra looked down at the web (which was something else in another language) popped one cord, popped another. The tension gave, till it unraveled and she jumped to the floor. As she stood she saw the other platoon kid was Kile, who worked with Lizzy in Repair. Brass had started struggling. "Keep still a second." She began to pop cords.

  "What did he say to you?" Brass wanted to know. "Was that his name, or was he telling you to lie down and shut u'?"

  She shrugged and broke another. "Tarik, that's mountain in Old Moorish. Jebel's Mountain, maybe."


  Brass sat up as the frayed string fell. "How did you do that?" he asked. "I pushed against the thing for ten minutes and it wouldn't give."

  'Tell you some other time. Jebel could be somebody's name."

  Brass looked back at the broken web, clawed behind one tufted ear, then shook his puzzled head and reared.

  "At least they're not Invaders," Rydra said.

  "Who says?"

  "I doubt that many humans on the other side of the axis have been heard of Old Moorish. The Earthmen who migrated there all came from North and South America before Americasia was formed and Pan Africa swallowed up Europe. Besides, the Titin penal caves are inside Caesar."

  "Oh yeah," Brass said. "Hmm. But that doesn't mean one of its alumni has to be."

  She looked at where the wall had opened. Grasping their situation seemed as futile as grasping that blue metal.

  "What the hell ha"ened anyway?"

  "We took off without a pilot," Rydra said. "I guess whoever broadcasts in Babel-17 can also broadcast English."

  "I don't think we took off without a 'ilot. Who did Slug talk to just before we shot? If we didn't have a 'ilot, we wouldn't be here. We'd be a grease s'ot on the nearest, biggest sun."

  "Probably whoever cracked those circuit boards." Rydra cast her mind into the past as the plaster of unconsciousness crumbled. “I guess the saboteur doesn't want to kill me- TW-55 could have picked me off as easily as he picked off the Baron."

  "I wonder if the s'y on the shi' s'eaks Babel-17 too?"

  Rydra nodded. "So do I."

  Brass looked around. "Is this all there is? Where's the rest of the crew?"

  "Sir, Ma'am?"

  They turned.

  Another opening in the wall. A skinny girl, with a green scarf binding back brown hair, held out a bowl.

  “The master said you were about, so I brought this.'' Her eyes were dark and large, and the lids beat like bird wings. She gestured with the bowl.

  Rydra responded to her openness, yet also detected a fear of strangers. Yet the thin fingers grasped surely on the bowl's edge. "You're kind to bring this."