Babel-17

  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.

  III

  "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 what"?"

  "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 U?ok 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'sTarik, 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 . . .

  She saw so much more than the little demonic jester on the stage saying, "Before our evening's entertainment I wish to ask our guest, Captain Wong, if she would speak some few words or perhaps recite for us." And she knew with a very small part of her mind—but it took no more—that she must use this chance to denounce him. The realization momentarily blotted out everything else, but then returned of its proper size, for she knew she could not let Cord stop her from getting to Headquarters, so she stood up and walked to the stage at the end of the commons, picking from Cord's mind as she walked a deadly blade so quickly honed to fit into the cracks of Geoffry Cord . . .

  . . . and she reached the platform beside the gorgeous beast, Klik, and mounted, hearing the voices that sang in the hall's silence, and tossed her words now from the sling of her vibrant voice, so that they hung outside her, and she watched them and watched his watching; the rhythm which was barely intricate to most ears in the commons was to him painful because it was timed to the processes of his body, to jar and strike against them . . .

  "All right. Cord, to be lord of this black barrick, Tarik's, you need more than jackal lore, or a belly full of murder and jelly knees.

  Open your mouth and your hands. To understand power, use your wit, please.

  Ambition like a liquid ruby stains your brain, birthed in the cervixed will to kill, swing in the arc of death's again, you name yourself victim each time you fill with swill the skull's cup lipping murder. It predicts your fingers' movement toward the blade long laid against the leather sheath cord-fixed to pick the plan your paling fingers made; you stayed in safety, missing worlds of wonder, under the lithe hiss of the personafix inflicting false memories to make them blunder while thunder cracks the change of Tarik.
r />   You stick pins in peaches, place your strange blade, ranged with a grooved tooth, while the long and strong lines of my meaning make your mind change from fulgent tofrangent. Now you hear the wrong cord-song, to instruct you. Assassin, pass in . . .

  . . and she was surprised he had held up this long- She looked directly at Geoffry Cord. Geoffry Cord looked directly at her and shrieked. . .

  The scream snapped something- She had been thinking in Babel-17 and choosing her English words with it. But now she was thinking in English again.

  Geoffry Cord jerked his head sideways, black hair shaking, flung his table over, and ran, raging, toward her. The drugged knife which she had seen only through his mind was out and aimed at her stomach.

  She jumped back, kicked at his wrist as he vaulted the platform edge, missed, but struck his face. He fell backwards, rolling on the floor.

  Gold, silver, amber: Brass was running from his side of the room. Silver-haired Jebel was coming from the other, his cloak billowing. And the Butcher had already reached her, was between her and the uncoiling Cord.

  "What is this?" Jebel demanded.

  Cord was on one knee, knife still poised. His black eyes went from vibra-gun muzzle to vibra-gun muzzle, then to Brass' unsheathed claws. He froze. "I don't appreciate attacks on my guests."

  "That knife is meant for you, Jebel," she panted. "Check the records of Tarik's personafix. He was going to kill you and get the Butcher under hypnotic control, and take over Tarik."

  "Oh," Jebel said. "One of those-"He turned to the Butcher. "It was time for another one, wasn't it? About once every six months. I'm again grateful to you, Captain Wong."

  The Butcher stepped forward and took the knife from Cord, whose body seemed frozen, whose eyes danced. Rydra listened to Cord's breath measure out the silence, while the Butcher, holding the knife by the blade, examined it. The blade itself, in the Butcher's heavy fingers, was printed steel. The handle, a seven-inch length of bone, was ridged, runneled, and stained with walnut dye.

  With his free hand, the Butcher caught his fingers in Cord's black hair. Then, not particularly quickly, he pushed the knife to the hilt into Cord's right eye, handle first.

  The scream became a gurgle. The flailing hands fell from the Butcher's shoulders. Those sitting close stood.

  Rydra's heart banged twice to break her ribs. "But you didn't even check.. . . Suppose I was wrong . . . Maybe there was more to it than ..." Her tongue wagged through the meaningless protests. And maybe her heart had stopped.

  The Butcher, both hands bloody, looked at her coldly. "He moved with a knife on Tarik toward Jebel or Lady and he dies." Right fist ground on left palm, now soundless with red lubricant.

  "Miss Wong," Jebel said, "from what I've seen, there's little doubt in my mind that Cord was certainly dangerous. I'm sure there's not much in yours, either. You are highly useful. I am highly obliged. I hope this trip down the Dragon's Tongue proves propitious. The Butcher had just told me it was at your request that we are going."

  "Thank you, but ..." Her heart was pounding again. She tried to form some clause to hang from the hook of 'but' still hesitant in her mouth. Instead she got very sick, pitched forward, half blind. The Butcher caught her on red palms.

  The round, warm, blue room again. But alone, and she was at last able to think about what had happened in the commons. It was not what she'd repeatedly tried to describe to Mocky. It was what Mocky had repeatedly insisted to her: telepathy. But apparently, telepathy was the nexus of old talent and a new way of thinking. It opened worlds of perception, of action. Then why was she sick? She recalled how time slowed when her mind worked under Babel-17, how her mental processes speeded up. If there was a corresponding increase in her physiological functions, her body might not be up to the strain.

  The tapes from the Rimbaud had told her the next 'sabotage' attempt would be at Administrative Alliance Headquarters. She wanted to get there with the language, the vocabulary and grammar, give it to them, and retire. She was almost ready to hand over the search for this mysterious speaker. But no, not quite, there was still something, something to be heard and spoken . . .

  Sick and falling, she snagged on bloody fingers, woke starting. The Butcher's egoless brutality, hammered linear by what she could not know, less than primitive, was for all its horror, still human. Though bloody handed, he was safer than the precision of the world linguistically corrected. What could you say to a man who could not say I? What could he say to her? Jebel's cruelties, kindnesses, existed in the articulate limits of civilization. But this red bestiality—fascinated her!

  IV

  She rose from the hammock, this time unsnapping the bandage. She'd felt better nearly an hour, but she had lain still thinking most of the time. The ramp tilted to her feet.

  When the infirmary wall solidified behind her, she paused in the corridor. The airflow pulsed like breath. Her translucent slacks brushed the tops of her bare feet. The neckline of her black silk blouse lay loose on her shoulders.

  She had rested well into Tarik's night shift. During a period of high activity, the sleeping time was staggered, but when they merely moved from location to location, there were hours when nearly the whole population slept.

  Rather than head toward the commons, she turned down an unfamiliar sloping tunnel. White light diffused from the floor, became amber fifty feet on, then amber became orange—she stopped and looked at her hands in the orange light—and forty feet further, the orange light was red. Then: blue.

  The space opened around her, the walls slanting back, the ceiling rising into darkness too high to see. The air flickered and blotted with the after-image from the change in color. Insubstantial mist plus her unsettled eyes made her turn to orient herself.

  A man was silhouetted against the red entrance to the hall. "Butcher?"

  He walked toward her, blue light fogging his features as he neared. He stopped, nodded.

  "I decided to take a walk when I felt better," she explained. "What part of the ship is- this?"

  "Discorporate quarters."

  "I should have known." They fell in step with one another. "Are you just wandering around, too?"

  He shook his heavy head. "An alien ship passes close to Tarik and Jebel wants its sensory vectors."

  "Alliance or Invader?"

  The Butcher shrugged. “Only to know that it is not a human ship."

  There were nine species among the seven explored galaxies with interstellar travel. Three had allied themselves definitely with the Alliance. Four had sided with the Invaders. Two were not committed.

  They had gone so far into the discorporate sector nothing seemed solid. The walls were blue mist without corners. The echoing crackle of transference energies caused distant lightning, and her eyes were deviled by half-remembered ghosts, who had always passed moments ago, yet were never present,

  "How far do we go?" she asked, having decided to walk with him, thinking as she spoke: If he doesn't know the word for I, how can he understand 'we'?

  Understanding or not he answered, "Soon," Then he looked directly at her with dark, heavy ridged eyes and asked, "Why?"

  The tone of his voice was so different, she knew he was not referring to anything in their exchange during the past few minutes. She cast in her mind for anything she had done that might strike him as perplexing.

  He repeated, "Why?"

  "Why what. Butcher?"

  "Why the saving of Jebel from Cord?"

  There was no objection in his question, only ethical curiosity. "Because I like him and because I need him to get me to Headquarters and I would feel sort of funny if I'd let him . . ." She stopped. "Do you know who I am-“

  He shook his head.

  "Where do you come from Butcher? What planet were you born on?"

  He shrugged. "The head," he said, after a moment, "they said there was something wrong with the brain."

  "Who?"

  "The doctors."

  Blue fog drifted between them.
r />   "The doctors on Titin?" she hazarded.

  The Butcher nodded.

  "Then why didn't they put you in a hospital instead of a prison?"

  "The brain is not crazy, they said. This hand"—he held up his left—"kill four people in three days. This hand"—he raised the other—“kill seven. Blow up four buildings with thermite. The foot"—he slapped his left leg—"kicked in the head of the guard at the Telechron Bank. There's a lot of money there, too much to carry. Carry maybe four hundred thousand credits- Not much."

  "You robbed the Telechron Bank of four hundred thousand credits!"

  "Three days, eleven people, four buildings: all for four hundred thousand credits. But Titin"—his face twisted—"was not fun at all."

  "So I'd heard- How long did it take for them to catch you?"

  "Six months."

  Rydra whistled. “I take my hat off to you, if you could keep out of their hands that long, after a bank robbery. And you know enough biotics to perform a difficult Caesarean section and keep the fetus alive. There's something in that head."

  "The doctors say the brain not stupid."

  "Look, you and I are going to talk to each other. But first I have to teach"—she stopped—"the brain something."

  "What?"

  "About you and I. You must hear the words a hundred times a day. Don't you ever wonder what they mean?"

  "Why? Most things make sense without them."

  "Hey, speak in whatever language you grew up with."

  "No."

  "Why not? I want to see if it's one I know anything about."

  "The doctors say there's something wrong with the brain."

  "All right. What did they say was wrong?"

  "Aphasia, alexia, amnesia."

  "Then you were pretty messed up." She frowned. "Was that before or after the bank robbery?"

  "Before."

  She tried to order what she had learned.'' Something happened to you that left you with no memory, unable to speak or read, and so the first thing you did was rob the Telechron bank—which Telechron Bank?"