Samuel Delany - Babel-17

We wake, turning.

Spined against the floor, his spine turning, chest hollowed, air in the wires, sparks glint from the wired ceiling tapping his sparking fingernails. Coughs, cries.

The twin behind the eyes coughs, cries.

The dark twin doubles on the floor, swallows his tongue.

Splashed to the dark pole circuited behind the eyes, the dark twin snaps his spine free, slaps his palms against the ceiling. Charged beads fly.

The ceiling, polarized, batters his cheek with metal.

Tears free skin. Tears ribs, torn pectorals off metal curved away black, behind the cracks, dried, that are his torn lips. More.

Buttocks and shoulderblades grind on the floor gritty and green with brine.

They wake.

We wake, turning.

He, gargling blood, turns, born, on the wet floor . . .

"WE JUST LEFT the Sna'.Ca'tain. You two drunk yet?"

Rydra's voice: "No."

"How do you like that. I guess you're all right, though."

Rydra's voice: "The brain fine. The body fine."

"Huh? Hey, Butcher, she didn't have one of her s'ells again?"

The Butcher's voice: "No."

"Both of you sound funny as hell. Shall I send the Slug u' there to take a look at you?"

The Butcher's voice: "No."

"All right. It's clear sailing now, and I can cut a cou'le of hours off. What do you say?"

The Butcher's voice: What is it to say?"

"Try 'thanks.' You know, I'm flying my tail off down here."

Rydra's voice: "Thanks."

"You're welcome, I guess. I'll leave you two alone. Hey, I'm sorry if I interru'ted something."

BUTCHER, I didn't know! I couldn't have known!

And in the echo their minds fused a cry. Couldn't have—couldn't. This light—

I told Brass, told him you must speak a language without the word I and I said I didn't know of one; but there was one, the obvious one, Babel-17 . . . !

Congruent synapses quivered sympathetically till images locked, and out of herself she created, saw them—

—In the solitary confinement box of Titin, he scratched a map on the green wall paint with his spur over the palimpsestic obscenities of two centuries' prisoners, a map that they would follow on his escape and would take them in the wrong direction; she watched him pace that four-foot space for three months till his six and a half foot frame was starved to a hundred and one pounds and he collapsed in the chains of starvation.

On a triple rope of words she climbed from the pit: starve, stave, stake; collapse, collate, collect; chains, change, chance.

He collected his winnings from the cashier and was about to stride across the maroon carpet of Casino Cosmica to the door when the black croupier blocked his way, smiling at the thick money case. "Would you like to take one more chance, sir? Something to challenge a player of your skill?" He was taken to a magnificent 3-D chessboard with glazed ceramic pieces.

"You play against the house computer. Against each piece you lose, you stake a thousand credits. Each piece you win, gains you the same. Checks win or lose you five hundred. Checkmate gains the winner one hundred times the rest of the game's earnings, for either you or the house." It was a game to even out his exorbitant winnings—and he had been winning exorbitantly. "Going home and take this money now," he said to the croupier. The croupier smiled and said, "The house insists you play." She watched, fascinated, while the Butcher shrugged, turned to the board—and checkmated the computer in a seven move fool's mate. They gave him his million credits—and tried to kill him three times before he got to the mouth of the casino. They did not succeed, but the sport was better than the gambling.

Watching him function and react in these situations, her mind shook inside his, curving to his pain or pleasure, strange emotions because they were ego-less and inarticulate, magic, seductive, mythical. Butcher—

She managed to interrupt the headlong circling.

—if you understood Babel-17 all along, her questions hurled in her own storming brain, why did you only use it gratuitously for yourself, an evening of gambling, a bank robbery, when a day later you would lose everything and make no attempt to keep things for yourself?

What 'self? There was no I.

She had entered him in some bewildering, reversed sexuality. Enclosing her, he was in agony. The light—you make! You make! his crying in terror.

Butcher, she asked, more familiar in patterning words about emotional turbulences than he, what does my mind in yours look like?

Bright, bright moving, he howled, the analytical precision of Babel-17, crude as stone to articulate their melding, making so many patterns, reforming them.

That's just being a poet she explained, the oblique connection momentarily cutting the flood through. Poet in Greek means maker or builder.

There's one? There's a pattern now. Ahhhh!—so bright, bright!

Just that simple semantic connection? She was astounded.

But the Greeks were poets three thousand years ago and you are a poet now. You snatch words together over such distance and their wakes blind me. Your thoughts are all fire, over shapes I cannot catch. They sound like music too deep, that shakes me.

That's because you were never shaken before. But I'm flattered.

You are so big inside me I will break. I see the pattern named The Criminal and artistic consciousness meeting in the same head with one language between them . . .

Yes, I had started to think something like-Flanking it, shapes called Baudelaire—Ahhh!—and Villon.

They were ancient French po—

Too bright! Too bright! The 'I' in me is not strong enough to hold them. Rydra, when I look at the night and stars, it is only a passive act, but you are active even watching, and halo the stars with more luminious flame.

What you perceive you change, Butcher. But you must perceive it.

I must-the light; central in you I see mirror and Motion used, and the pictures are meshed, rotating, and everything is choice.

My poems! It was the embarrassment of nakedness. Definitions of I each great and precise. She thought: I/Aye/Eye, the self, a sailor's yes, the organ of visual perception-He began, You—

You/Ewe/Yew, the other self, a female sheep, the Celtic vegetative symbol for death.

—you ignite my words with meanings I can only glimpse. What am I surrounding? What am I, surrounding you?

Still watching, she saw him commit robbery, murder, mayhem, because the semantic validity of mine and thine were ruined in a snarl of frayed synapses. Butcher, I heard it ringing in your muscles, that loneliness, that made you make Jebel hook up the Rimbaud just to have someone near you who could speak this analytical tongue, the same reason you tried to save the baby, she whispered.

Images locked on her brain.

Long grass whispered by the weir. Alleppo's moons fogged the evening. The plamsmobile hummed, and with measured impatience he flicked the ruby emblem on the steering wheel with the tip of his left spur. Lill twisted against him, laughing. "You know. Butcher, if Mr. Big thought you'd driven out there with me on such a romantic night he'd get very hostile. You're really gonna take me to Paris when you finish here?" Unnamed warmth mixed in him with unnamed impatience. Her shoulder was damp under his hand, her lips red. She had coiled her champagne colored hair high over one ear: Her body beside his moved in a rippling motion that had the excuse of her turning to face him. "If you're kidding me, about Paris, I'll tell Mr. Big. If I were a smart girl, I'd wait till after you took me there before I let us get . . . friendly." Her breath was perfumed in the sweltering night. He moved his other hand up her arm. "Butcher, get me off this hot, dead world, Swamps, caves, rain! Mr. Big scares me. Butcher! Take me away from him, to Paris. Don't just be pretending. I want to go with you so bad." She made another laughing sound with only her lips. "I guess I'm . . . I'm not a smart girl after all." He placed his mouth against her mouth—and broke her neck with one thrust of his hands. Her eyes still open, she sagged backwards. The hypodermic ampule she had been about to plunge into his shoulder fell from her hand, rolled across the dashboard, and dropped among the foot pedals. He carried her into the weir, and came back muddy to mid-thigh. In the seat he flipped on the radio. "It's finished, Mr. Big."