Slug guided the platoon to the chairlift that dropped into Jebel’s pit:
“…all right, when you get down there, go over to that man in the red shirt and ask him to put you to work. Yeah, work. Don’t look so surprised, stupid. Kile, strap yourself in, will you. It’s two hundred and fifty feet down and a little hard on your head if you fall. Hey, you two, cut it out. I know he started first. Just get down there and be constructive…”
Rydra watched machinery and organic supplies—Alliance and Invader—handed in from the dismantling crews that worked over the ruins of the two ships, and their swarm of cruisers. The stacked, sorted crates were piled along the loading area.
“We’ll be jettisoning the cruiser ships shortly. I’m afraid the Rimbaud will have to go, too. Is there anything you’d like to salvage before we dump it, Captain?” She turned at Tarik’s voice.
“There are some important papers and recordings I have to get. I’ll leave my platoon here and take my officers with me.”
“Very well.” Tarik joined her at the railing. “As soon as we finish here, I’ll send a work crew with you in case there’s anything large you want to bring back.”
“That won’t be…” she begun. “Oh, I see. You need fuel, don’t you.”
Tarik nodded. “And stasis components; also spare parts for our own spider-boats. We will not touch the Rimbaud until you have finished with it.”
“I see. I guess that’s only fair.”
“I’m impressed,” Tarik went on to change the subject, “with your method of breaking the Invader’s defense net. That particular formation has always given us some trouble. The Butcher tells me you tore it apart in less than five minutes, and we only lost one spider. That’s a record. I didn’t know you were a master strategist as well as a poet. You have many talents. It is lucky that Butcher took your call, though. I would not have had sense enough to follow your instructions just on the spur of the moment. Had the results not been so praiseworthy, I would have been put out with him. But, then, his decisions have never yet brought me less than profit.” He looked across the pit.
On a suspended platform in the center, the ex-convict lounged, silent overseer to the operations below.
“He’s a curious man,” Rydra said. “What was he in prison for?”
“I have never asked,” Tarik said, raising his chin. “He has never told me. There are many curious persons on Jebel. And privacy is important in so small a space. Oh, yes. In a month’s time you will learn how tiny the Mountain is.”
“I forgot myself,” Rydra apologized. “I shouldn’t have inquired.”
An entire foresection of a blasted Invader’s cruiser was being dragged through the funnel on a twenty-foot wide, pronged conveyor. Dismantlers swarmed up the side with bolt punches and laser spots. Gig-cranes caught on the smooth hull and began to turn it slowly.
A workman at the port-disk suddenly cried out and swung hastily aside. His tools clattered down the bulkhead. The port-disk swung up and a figure in a silver skin suit dropped the twenty-five feet to the conveyor belt, rolled between two prongs, regained footing, leaped down the next ten-foot drop to the floor, and ran. The hood slipped from her head to release shoulder-length brown hair which swung wildly as she changed her course to avoid a trundling sledge. She moved fast, yet with a certain awkwardness. Then Rydra recognized that what she had taken for paunchiness in the fleeing Invader was at least a seven months’ pregnancy. A mechanic flung a wrench at her, but she dodged so that it deflected off her hip. She was running toward an open space between the stacked supplies.
Then the air was cut by a vibrant hiss: the Invader stopped, sat down hard on the floor as the hiss repeated; she pitched to the side, kicked out one leg, kicked again.
On the tower, the Butcher put his vibra-gun back in the holster.
“That was unnecessary,” Tarik said, with shocking softness.
“Couldn’t we have…” and there seemed to be nothing to suggest. On Tarik’s face was pain and curiosity. The pain, she realized, was not at the double death on the deck below, but the chagrin of a gentleman caught at something ugly. His curiosity was at her reaction. And it might be worth her life to react to the twisting in her stomach. She watched him preparing to speak: he was going to say—and so she said it for him—: “They will use pregnant women as pilots on fighting ships. Their reflexes are faster.” She watched for him to relax, saw the relaxation begin.
The Butcher was already stepping from the chairlift onto the catwalk. He came toward them, banging his fist against his corded thigh with impatience. “They should ray everything before they take it on. They won’t listen. Second time in two months now.” He grunted.
Below, Jebel’s men and her platoon mingled over the body.
“They will, next time.” Tarik’s voice was still soft and cool. “Butcher, you seemed to have pricked Captain Wong’s interest. She was wondering what sort of a fellow you were, and I really couldn’t tell her. Perhaps you can explain why you had to—”
“Tarik,” Rydra said. Her eyes, seeking him, snagged on the Butcher’s dark gaze. “I’d like to go to my ship now and see to it before you start salvaging.”
Tarik exhaled the rest of the breath he’d held since the hiss of the vibra-gun. “Of course.”
“No, not a monster, Brass.” She unlocked the door to the captain’s cabin of the Rimbaud and stepped through. “Just expedient. It’s just like…” And she said a lot more to him till his fang-distended mouth sneered and he shook his head.
“Talk to me in English, Ca’tain. I don’t understand you.”
She took the dictionary from the console and placed it on top of the charts. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This stuff is wicked. Once you learn it, it makes everything so easy. Get those tapes out of the playback. I want to run through them again.”
“What are they?” Brass brought them over.
“Transcriptions of the last Babel-17 dialogues at the War Yards just before we took off.” She put them on the spindle and started the first playing.
A melodious torrent rippled through the room, caught her up in ten- and twenty-second bursts she could understand. The plot to undermine TW-55 was delineated with hallucinatory vividness. When she reached a section she could not understand, she was left shaking against the wall of noncommunication. While she listened, while she understood, she moved through psychedelic perceptions. When understanding left, her breath left her lungs with shock, and she had to blink, shake her head, once accidentally bit her tongue, before she was free again to comprehend.
“Captain Wong?”
It was Ron. She turned her head, aching slightly now, to face him.
“Captain Wong, I don’t want to disturb you.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “What is it?”
“I found this in the Pilot’s Den.” He held up a small spool of tape.
Brass was still standing by the door. “What was it doing in my part of the shi’?”
Ron’s features fought with each other for an expression. “I just played it back with Slug. It’s Captain Wong’s—or somebody’s—request to Flight Clearance back at the War Yards for takeoff, and the all-clear signal to Slug to get ready to blast.”
“I see,” Rydra said. She took the spool. Then she frowned. “This reel is from my cabin. I use the three-lobed spools I brought with me from the University. All the other machines on the ship are supplied with four-lobed ones. That tape came from this machine here.”
“So,” Brass said, “a’’arently somebody snuck in and made it when you were out.”
“When I’m out, this place is locked so tight a discorporate flea couldn’t crawl under the door.” She shook her head. “I don’t like this. I don’t know where I’ll be fouled up next. Well—” she stood up—“at least I know what I have to do about Babel-17 now.”
“What’s that?” Brass asked. Slug had come to the door and was looking over Ron’s flowered shoulder.
Rydra looked over the cr
ew. Discomfort or distrust, which was worst? “I really can’t tell you now, can I?” she said. “It’s that simple.” She walked to the door. “I wish I could. But it would be a little silly after this whole business.”
“But I would rather speak to Tarik!”
Klik ruffled his feathers and shrugged. “Lady, I would honor your desire above all others’ on the mountain, save Tarik’s. And it is Tarik’s desire that you now counter. He wishes not to be disturbed. He is plotting Jebel’s destination over the next time-cycle. He must judge the currents carefully, and weigh even the weights of the stars about us. It is an arduous task, and—”
“Then where’s the Butcher? I’ll ask him, but I would prefer to talk directly with—”
The jester pointed with a green talon. “He is in the biology theater. Go down through the commons and take the first lift to level twelve. It is directly to your left.”
“Thank you.” She headed toward the gallery steps.
At the top of the lift she found the huge iris door, and pressed the entrance disk. Leaves folded, and she blinked in green light.
His round head and mildly humped shoulders were silhouetted before a bubbling tank in which a tiny figure floated: the spray of bubbles that rose about the form deflated on the feet, caught in the crossed curved hands like sparks, frothed the bent head, and foamed in the brush of birth-hair that swirled up in the miniature currents.
The Butcher turned, saw her, and said, “It died.” He nodded with vigorous belligerence. “It was alive until five minutes ago. Seven and a half months. It should have lived. It was strong enough!” His left fist cracked against his right palm, as she had seen him do in the commons. Shaking muscles stilled. He thumbed toward an operating table where the Invader’s body lay—sectioned. “Badly hurt before she got out. Internal organs messed up. A lot of abdominal necrosis all the way though.” He turned his hand so the thumb now pointed over his shoulder to the drifting homunculus, and the gesture that had seemed rough took on an economical grace. “Still—it should have lived.”
He switched off the light in the tank and the bubbles ceased. He stepped from behind the laboratory table. “What the Lady want?”
“Tarik is planning Jebel’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 anymore. What the Lady want?”
What leaped and leaped retreated now—and so did she. “I want to know if Tarik 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 Jebel could remain in radio-dense space all the way. If Tarik will escort me to Headquarters, I will guarantee his 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. “Tarik.” He spoke into the wall intercom.
The speaker was directional so she couldn’t hear the answer.
“Make Jebel 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. Tarik will take Jebel 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, Jebel 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.
3
“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 Tarik. 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.
* * *
She sat in the great commons while men and women filed in for the evening meal, and was aware of so much more.
* * *
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 her dreams 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, a fear!
* * *
They set her place, brought first a flagon, then bread, which she saw and smiled at but was seeing so much else.
* * *
It gonged in the hall, flashed red in the indigo tide, and she searched for Tarik 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 M
ake death with the knife I have sheathed to my leg, and again
* * *
Around her people were sitting, relaxing, while the serving people hurried to the food counter where the roasts and fried fruit steamed.
* * *
With my steel tongue make me a place in an eyrie high on Jebel, and the minds about him, groping and hungering, mumbling over humor and hurt, loving a little and groping for more, all cross-hatched 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 with 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,
* * *
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.
* * *
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 plottings, 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 Tarik would be sitting, then blade between Tarik’s ribs with his serpent fang, and the grooved metal 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,
* * *