Samuel Delany - Babel-17

"No. It would be more like the past few days. Are you sure the Rimbaud did not land here recently under Captain Rydra Wong?"

"Wong? I believe she did land yesterday, but not in the Rimbaud. It was an unmarked fighter ship. There was some mix-up because the serial numbers had been filed off the tubes and there was a possibility it might have been stolen."

"Was Captain Wong all right when she disembarked?"

"She'd apparently relinquished command to her—" The voice stopped.

"Well?"

"Excuse me, sir. This has been all marked classified. I didn't see the sticker, and it was accidentally put back in the regular file. I can't give you any more information. It's only cleared to authorized persons."

"I'm Dr. Markus T'mwarba," the doctor said, with authority and no idea whether it would do any good.

"Oh, there is a notation concerning you, sir. But you're not on the cleared list."

"Then what the hell does it say, young lady?"

“Just that if you requested information, to refer you directly to General Forester."

An hour later he walked into General Forester's office. "All right, what's the matter with Rydra?"

"Where's the tape?"

"If Rydra wanted me to have it, she had good reason. If she'd wanted you to have it, she would have given it to you. Believe me, you won't get your hands on it unless I give it to you."

"I'd expected more cooperation. Doctor."

"I am cooperating. I'm here. General. But you must want me to do something, and unless I know exactly what's going on, I can't."

"It's a very unmilitary attitude," General Forester said, coming around the desk. "It's one I'm having to deal with more and more, recently. I don't know whether I like it. But I don't know whether I dislike it either." The green-suited stellarman sat on the desk's edge, touched the stars on his collar, looked pensive. "Miss Wong was the first person I've met in a long time to whom I could not say: do this, do that, and be damned if you inquire about the consequences. The first time I spoke to her about Babel-17, I thought I could just hand her the transcription, and she would hand it back to me in English. She told me, flatly: No; I would have to tell her more. That's the first time anyone's told me I had to do anything in fourteen years. I may not like it; I sure as hell respect it." His hands dropped protectively to his lap (Protective? Was it Rydra who had taught him to interpret that movement, T'mwarba wondered briefly.) "It's so easy to get caught in your fragment of the world. When a voice comes cutting through, it's important. Rydra Wong . . ." and the General stopped, and expression settling on his features that made T'mwarba chill as he looked at it with what Rydra had taught him.

“Is she all right. General Forester? Is this something medical?"

"I don't know," the General said. "There's a woman in my inner office—and a man. I can't tell you whether the woman is Rydra Wong or not. It certainly isn't the same woman I talked to that evening on Earth about Babel-17."

But T'mwarba, already at the door, shoved it open.

A man and a woman looked up. The man was a massively graceful, amber-haired—convict, the doctor realized from the mark on his arm. The woman—

He put both fists on his hips: "All right, what am I about to say to you?"

She said: "Non comprehension."

Breathing pattern, curl of hands in lap, carriage of shoulders, the details whose import she had demonstrated to him a thousand times: he learned in the horrifying length of a breath just how much they identified. For a moment he wished she had never taught him, because they were all gone, and their absence in her familiar body were worse than scars and disfigurements. He began in a voice that was habitually for her, the one he had praised or chastened her with, "I was going to say—if this is a joke, sweetheart, I'll . . . paddle you." It ended with the voice for strangers, for salesmen and wrong numbers, and he felt unsteadied. "If you're not Rydra, who are you?"

She said: "Non comprehension of the question. General Forester, is this man Doctor Markus T'mwarba?"

"Yes, he is."

"Look." Dr. T'mwarba turned to the General. "I'm sure you've gone over fingerprints, metabolic rates, retina patterns, that sort of identification."

"That's Rydra Wong's body. Doctor."

“All right: hypnotics, experimental imprinting, graft of pre-synapsed cortical matter—can you think of any other way to get one mind into another head?"

"Yes. Seventeen. There's no evidence of any of them." The General stepped from the door. "She's made it clear she wants to speak to you alone. I'll be right outside." He closed the door.

"I'm pretty sure who you're not," Doctor T'mwarba said after a moment.

The woman blinked and said: "Message from Rydra Wong, delivered verbatim, non comprehension of its significance." Suddenly the face took on its familiar animation. Her hands grasped each other, and she leaned slightly forward: "Mocky, am I glad you got here. I can't sustain this very long, so here goes. Babel-17 is more or less like Onoff, Algol, Fortran. I am telepathic after all, only I've just learned how to control it. I . . . we've taken care of the Babel-17 sabotage attempts. Only we're prisoners, and if you want to get us out, forget about who I am. Use what's on the end of the tape, and find out who he is!" She pointed to the Butcher.

The animation left; the rigidity returned to her face. The whole transformation left T'mwarba holding his breath. He shook his head, started breathing again. After a moment he went back into the General's office. "Who's the jailbird?" he asked matter-of-factly.

"We're tracking that down now. I hoped to have the report this morning." Something on the desk flashed.

"Here it is now." He flipped a slot in the desk top and pulled out a folder. As he slitted the seal, he paused. "Would you like to tell me what Onoff, Algol, and Fortran are?"

"To be sure, listening at keyholes." T'mwarba sighed and sat down in a bubble chair in front of the desk. “They're ancient, twentieth century languages—artificial languages that were used to program computers, designed especially for machines. Onoff was the simplest. It reduced everything to a combination of two words, on and off, or the binary number system. The others were more complicated."

The General nodded, and finished opening the folder. "That guy came from the swiped spider-boat with her. The crew got very upset when we wanted to put them in separate quarters." He shrugged. "It's something psychic. Why take chances? We leave them together."

"Where is the crew? Were they able to help you?"

"Them? It's like trying to talk to something out of your bad dreams. Transport. Who can talk to people like that?"

"Rydra could," Doctor T'mwarba said. "I'd like to see if I might."

"If you wish. We're keeping them at Headquarter's." He opened the folder, then made a face. "Odd. There's a fairly detailed account of his existence for a five year period that starts with some petty thievery, strong arm work, then graduates to a couple of rubouts. A bank robbery—" The General pursed his lips and nodded appreciatively. “He served two years in the penal caves of Titin, escaped—this boy is something. Disappeared into the Specelli Snap where he either died, or perhaps got onto a shadow-ship. He certainly didn't die. But before December '61, he doesn't seem to have existed. He's usually called the Butcher."

Suddenly the General dived into a drawer and came up with another folder. "Kreto, Earth, Minos, Callisto," he read, then slapped the folder with the back of his hand. "Aleppo, Rhea, Olympia, Paradise, Dis!"

"What's that, the Butcher's itinerary until he went into Titin?"

"It just so happens it is. But it's also the locations of a series of accidents that began in December '61. We'd just gotten around to connecting them up with Babel-17. We'd only been working with recent 'accidents', but then this pattern from a few years ago turned up. Reports of the same sort of radio exchange. Do you think Miss Wong has brought home our saboteur?"