Samuel Delany - Babel-17

The black of his eyebrows raised and the slash of mouth curved in the dark face, "You read heraldry?" He raised long fingers to the shield on his chest.

"I do."

"An accomplishment. Captain. We live in a world of isolated communities, each hardly touching its neighbor, each speaking, as it were, a different language."

"I speak many."

The Baron nodded. "Sometimes I believe Captain Wong, that without the Invasion, something for the Alliance to focus its energies upon, our society would disintegrate. Captain Wong—" He stopped, and the fine lines of his face shifted, contracted to concentration, then a sudden opening. "Rydra Wong . . . ?"

She nodded, smiling at his smile, yet wary before what the recognition would mean.

"I didn't realize—" He extended his hand as though he were meeting her all over again. "But, of course—" The surface of his manner shaled away, and had she never seen this transformation before she would have warmed to his warmth. "Your books, I want you to know—" The sentence trailed in a slight shaking of the head. Dark eyes too wide; lips, in their, humor, too close to a leer; hands seeking one another: it all spoke to her of a disquieting appetite for her presence, a hunger for something she was or might be, a ravenous— "Dinner at my home is served at seven." He interrupted her thought with unsettling appropriateness. "You will dine with the Baroness and myself this evening."

"Thank you. But I wanted to discuss with my crew—"

“I extend the invitation to your entire entourage. We have a spacious house, conference rooms at your disposal, as well as entertainment, certainly less confined than your ship." The tongue, purplish and flickering behind white, white teeth; the brown lines of his lips, she thought, form words as languidly as the slow mandibles of the cannibal mantis.

“Please come a little early so we can prepare you—"

She caught her breath, then felt foolish; a faint narrowing of his eyes told her he had registered, though not understood, her start.

“—for your tour through the yards. General Forester has suggested you be made privy to all our efforts against the Invaders. That is quite an honor, Madam. There are many well-seasoned officers at the yards who have not seen some of the things you will be shown. A good deal of it will probably be tedious, I dare say. In my opinion, it's stuffing you with a lot of trivial tidbits. But some of our attempts have been rather ingenious. We keep our imaginations simmering."

This man brings out the paranoid in me, she thought. I don't like him. "I'd prefer not to impose on you, Baron. There are some matters on my ship that I must—"

"Do come. Your work here will be much facilitated if you accept my hospitality, I assure you. A woman of your talent and accomplishment would be an honor to my house. And recently I have been starved"—dark lips slid together over gleaming teeth—"for intelligent conversation."

She felt her jaw clamp involuntarily on a third ceremonious refusal. But the Baron was saying: "I will expect you, and your crew, leisurely, before seven."

The saucer-disk slid away over the concourse. Rydra looked back at the ramp where her crew waited, silhouetted against the false evening. Her disk began to negotiate the slope to the Rimbaud.

"Well," she said to the little albino cook who had just come out of his pressure bandage the day before, "you're off tonight. Slug, the crew's going out to dinner. See if you can brush the kids up on their table manners—make sure every one knows which knife to eat his peas with, and all that."

"The salad fork is the little one on the outside," the Slug announces suavely, turning to the platoon.

"And what about the little one outside that?" Allegra asked.

"That's for oysters."

"But suppose they don't serve oysters?"

Flop rubbed his underlip with the knuckle of his thumb. "I guess you could pick your teeth with it."

Brass dropped a paw on Rydra's shoulder. "How you feel, Ca'tain?"

"Like a pig over a barbecue pit."

"You look sort of done—" Calli began.

"Done?" she asked.

“—in," he finished, quizzically.

"Maybe I've been working too hard. We're guests at the Baron VerDorco's this evening. I suppose we can all relax a bit there."

"VerDorco?" asked Mollya.

"He's in charge of coordinating the various research projects against the Invaders."

"This is where they make all the bigger and better secret weapons?" Ron asked.

"They also make smaller, more deadly ones. I imagine it should be an education."

"These sabotage attem'ts," Brass said. She had given them a rough idea of what was going on. "A successful one here at the War Yards could be 'retty bad to our efforts against the Invaders."

"It’s about as central a hit as they could try, next to planting a bomb in Administrative Alliance Headquarters itself."

"Will you be able to stop it?" Slug asked.

Rydra shrugged, turning to the shimmering absences of the discorporate crew. "I've got a couple of ideas. Look, I'm going to ask you guys to be sort of inhospitable this evening and do some spying. Eyes, I want you to stay on the ship and make sure you're the only one here. Ears, once we leave for the Baron's, go invisible and from then on, don't get more than six feet away from me until we're all back to the ship. Nose, you run messages back and forth. There's something going on that I don't like. I don't know whether it's my imagination or what."

The Eye spoke something ominous. Ordinarily, the corporate could only converse with the discorporate—and remember the conversation—over special equipment. Rydra solved the problem by immediately translating whatever they spoke to her into Basque before the weak synapses broke. Though the original words were lost, the translation remained: Those broken circuit plates weren't your imagination, was the gist of the Basque she retained.

She looked over the crew with gnawing discomfort. If one of the kids or officers was merely psychotically destructive, it would show up on his psyche index. There was among them, a consciously destructive one. It hurt, like an unlocatable splinter in the sole of her foot that jabbed occasionally with the pressure of walking. She remembered how she had searched them from the night. Pride. Warm pride in the way their functions meshed as they moved her ship through the stars. The warmth was the relieved anticipation for all that could go wrong with the machine-called-the-ship, if the machine-called-the-crew were not interlocked and precise. Cool pride in another part of her mind, at the ease with which they moved by one another: the kids, inexperienced both in living and working; the adults, so near pressure situations that might have scarred their polished efficiency and made psychic burrs to snag one another. But she had chosen them, and the ship, her world, was a beautiful place to walk, work, live,-for a journey's length.

But there was a traitor.

That shorted something. Somewhere in Eden, now . . . she recalled, again looking over the crew. Somewhere in Eden, now, a worm, a worm. Those cracked plates told her: the worm wanted to destroy not just her, but the ship, its crew and contents, slowly. No blades plunged in the night, no shots from around a corner, no cord looped on the throat as she entered a dark cabin. Babel-17, how good a language would it be to argue with for your life?

"Slug, the Baron wants me to come soon and see some of the latest methods of slaughter. Have the kids there decently early, will you? I'm leaving now. Eye and Ear, hop aboard."

"Righto, Captain," from Slug. The discorporate crew deperceptualized. She leaned her sled over the ramp again and slid away from the milling youngsters and officers, curious at the source of her apprehension.