Samuel Delany - Babel-17

"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 know 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?"