Samuel Delany - Babel-17

He switched off the light in the Tarik and the bubbles ceased. He stepped from behind the laboratory table. "What the Lady want?"

"Jebel is planning Tarik's route for the next months. Could you ask him . . ." She stopped. Then she asked, "Why?"

Ron's muscles, she thought, were living cords that snapped and sang out their messages. On this man, muscles were shields to hold the world out, the man in. And something inside was leaping up again and again, striking the shield from behind. The scored belly shifted, the chest contracted over a let breath, the brow smoothed, then creased again.

"Why?" she repeated. "Why did you try to save the child?"

He twisted his face for answer, and his left hand circled the convict's mark on his other bicep as though it had started to sting. Then he gave up with disgust. "Died. No good any more. What the Lady want?"

What leaped and leaped retreated now, and so did she. "I want to know if Jebel will take me to Administrative Alliance Headquarters. I have to deliver some important information concerning the Invasion. My pilot tells me the Specelli Snap runs within ten hyperstatic units, which a spider-boat could make, so Tarik could remain in radio defense space all the way. If Jebel will escort me to Headquarters, I will guarantee him protection and a safe return to the denser part of the Snap."

He eyed her. "All the way down the Dragon's Tongue?"

"Yes. That's what Brass told me the tip of the Snap was called."

"Protection guaranteed?"

"That's right. I'll show you my credentials from General Forester of the Alliance if you . . ."

But he waved for her silence. "Jebel?" He spoke into the wall intercom.

The speaker was directional so she couldn't hear the answer.

"Make Tarik go down the Dragon's Tongue during the first cycle." There was either questioning or objection.

"Go down the Tongue and it'll be good."

He nodded to the unintelligible whisper, then said, "It died," and switched off. "All right. Jebel will take Tarik to Headquarters."

Amazement undercut her initial disbelief. It was an amazement she would have felt before when he responded so unquestioningly to her plan to destroy the Invader's defense, had not Babel-17 precluded such feelings. "Well, thanks," she began, "but you haven't even asked me . . ." Then she decided to phrase the whole thing another way.

But the Butcher made a fist: "Knowing what ships to destroy, and ships are destroyed." He banged his fist against his chest. "Now to go down the Dragon's Tongue, Tarik go down the Dragon's Tongue." He banged his chest again.

She wanted to question, but looked at the dead fetus turning in dark liquid behind him and said instead, "Thank you, Butcher." As she stepped through the iris door, she mulled over what he had said to her, trying to frame some explanation of his actions. Even the rough way in which his words fell—

His words!

It struck her at once, and she hurried down the corridor.

"BRASS, he can't say 'I'!" She leaned across the table, surprised curiosity impelling her excitement.

The pilot locked his claws around his drinking horn. The wooden tables across the commons were being set up for the evening meal.

"Me, my, mine, myself. I don't think he can say any of those either. Or think them. I wonder where the hell he's from."

"You know any language where there's no word for—'I'?"

"I can think of a couple where it isn't used often, but no one that doesn't even have the concept, if only hanging around in a verb ending."

"Which all means wha`?"

"A strange man with a strange way of thinking. I don't know why, but he's aligned himself with me, sort of my ally on this trip and a go-between with Jebel, I'd like to understand, so I won't hurt him."

She looked around the commons at the bustle of preparation. The girl who had brought them chicken was glancing at her now, wondering, still afraid, fear melting to curiosity which brought her two tables nearer, then curiosity evaporating to indifference, and she was off for more spoons from the wall drawer.

She wondered what would happen if she translated her perceptions of people's movement and muscle tics into Babel-17. It was not only a language, she understood now, but a flexible matrix of analytical possibilities where the same ‘word' defined the stresses in a webbing of medical bandage, or a defensive grid of spaceships. What would it do with the tensions and yearnings in a human face? Perhaps the flicker of eyelids and fingers would become mathematics, without meaning. Or perhaps— While she thought, her mind changed gears into the headlong compactness of Babel-17. And she swept her eyes around the—voices.

Expanding and defining through one another, not the voices themselves, but the minds making the voices, braiding with one another, so that the man entering the hall now she knew to be the grieving brother of Pigfoot, and the girl who'd served them was in love, so in love with the dead youth from the discorporate sector who tickled and teased her dreams . . .

That she was sitting in the great commons while men and women filed infer the evening meal was a very small part of her consciousness.

. . . turning about the general hunger, a belly-beast with teeth in one man, a lazy pool in another, now the familiar rush of adolescent confusion as the Rimbaud's platoon came pummeling in, driven by the deep concern of Slug, and further over amidst ebullience, hunger, and love, and fear! It gonged in the hall, flashed red in the indigo tide, and she searched for Jebel or the Butcher because their names were in the fear, but found neither in the room; instead, a thin man named Geoffry Cord in whose brain crossed wires sparked and sputtered Make death with the knife I have sheathed to my leg, and again With my tongue make me a place in an eyrie high on Tarik, and the minds about him, groping and hungering, mumbling over humor and hurt, loving a little and groping for more, all crosshatched with relaxation one way at the coming meal, and in others anticipation at what clever Klik would present that evening, the minds of the actors of the pantomime keyed to performance while they perused the spectators whom, at an earlier hour, they had worked and slept with, one elderly navigator with a geometrical head hurrying to give the girl, who was to play in the play at being in love, a silver clasp he had melted and scribed himself to see if she would play at loving him . . .

They set her place, brought first a flagon, and then bread, which she saw and smiled at, but was seeing so much else; around her people were sitting, relaxing, while the serving people hurried to the food counter where the roasts and fried fruit steamed.

. . . yet through all this her mind circled back to the alarm of Geoffry Cord, I must act this evening as the actors close, and unable to focus on anything but his urgency, she watched him roil and ravel through his plotting, to hurry forward when the pantomime began as if he wanted to get a closer look as many would do, slip beside the table where Jebel would be sitting, then blade between Jebel’s ribs with his serpent fang, grooved metal which ran with paralytic poison, then chomp down on his hollow tooth that was filled with hypnotic drugs so that when he was taken prisoner they would think he was under somebody else's control, and at last he would release a wild story, implanted below the level of the hypnotics by many painful hours under the personafix, that he was under the Butcher's control; then somehow he would contrive to be alone with the Butcher and bite the Butcher's hand or wrist or leg, injecting the same hypnotic drugs that poisoned his own mouth and rend the hulking convict helpless, and he would control him, and when the Butcher ultimately became Tarik's ruler after the assassination, Geoffry Cord would become the Butcher's lieutenant, as the Butcher was now Jebel's, and when Jebel's Tarik was the Butcher's Tarik, Geoffry would control the Butcher the same way he suspected the Butcher controlled Jebel, and there would be a reign of harshness and all strangers expelled from the berg to death by vacuum, and they would fall mightily on all ships. Invader, Alliance, or Shadow in the Snap, and Rydra tore her mind from his and swept the brief surface of Jebel and the Butcher, and saw no hypnotics, but also that they suspected no treachery and her own delayed fear, taking her from what she felt in her slipping and lapping with doubled and halved voice . . . (her fear broke from her vast wordview, while she felt schismic rages of him and still would survive it and found his fear as porous, porous as a sponge) and no yes, she was able, even as she walked to pick the words and images that would drive and push him to his betrayal . . . (and no yes, once struck by his fear and rebounding, she brought herself back) . . . to a single line that scribed through both perception and action, speech and communication, both one now, picking down sounds that would persuade with the deliberation this lengthened time lent . . .