The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One

  Brass’s confusion was terrifying through his fangs. The glinting fleece above his eyes bristled.

  “Sphere,” she said, “il globo, gumlas.” She stood up. “Kule, kuglet, kring!”

  “Does it matter what language it’s in? A circle is a cir—”

  But she was laughing, running from the dining room.

  In her cabin she grabbed up her translation. Her eyes fled down the pages. She banged the button for the Navigators. Ron, wiping whipped cream from his mouth, said, “Yes, Captain? What do you want?”

  “A watch,” said Rydra, “and a—bag of marbles!”

  “Huh?” asked Calli.

  “You can finish your shortcake later. Meet me in G-center, right now.”

  “Mar-bles?” articulated Mollya wonderingly. “Marbles?”

  “One of the kids in the platoon must have brought along a bag of marbles. Get it and meet me in G-center.”

  She jumped over the ruined skin of the bubble seat and leapt up the hatchway, turned off at the radial shaft seven, and launched down the cylindrical corridor toward the hollow spherical chamber of G-center. The calculated center of gravity of the ship, it was a chamber thirty feet in diameter in constant free fall where certain acceleration-sensitive instruments took their readings. A moment later the three Navigators appeared through triametric entrances. Ron held up a mesh bag of glass balls. “Lizzy asks you to try and get these back to her by tomorrow afternoon because she’s been challenged by the kids in Drive and she wants to keep her championship.”

  “If this works she can probably have them back tonight.”

  “Work?” Mollya wanted to know. “Idea you?”

  “I do. Only it’s not really my idea.”

  “Whose is it, and what is it?” Ron asked.

  “I suppose it belongs to somebody who speaks another language. What we’ve got to do is arrange the marbles around the wall of the room in a perfect sphere, and then sit back with the clock and keep tabs on the second hand.”

  “What for?” asked Calli.

  “To see where they go and how long it takes them to get there.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Ron.

  “Our orbit tends toward a great circle about the Earth, right? That means everything in the ship is also tending to orbit in a great circle, and, if left free of influence, will automatically seek out such a path.”

  “Right. So what?”

  “Help me get these marbles in place,” Rydra said. “These things have iron cores. Magnetize the walls, will you, to hold them in place, so they can all be released at once.” (Ron, confused, went to power the metal walls of the spherical chamber.) “You still don’t see? You’re mathematicians, tell me about great circles.”

  Calli took a handful of marbles and started to space them—tiny click after click—over the wall. “A great circle is the largest circle you can cut through a sphere.”

  “The diameter of the great circle equals the diameter of the sphere,” from Ron, as he came back from the power switch.

  “The summation of the angles of intersection of any three great circles within one topologically contained shape approaches five-hundred-and-forty degrees. The summation of the angles of N great circles approaches N times one hundred and eighty degrees.” Mollya intoned the definitions, which she had begun memorizing in English with the help of a personafix that morning, in her musically inflected voice. “Marble here, yes?”

  “All over, yes. Evenly as you can space them, but they don’t have to be exact. Tell me some more about the intersections.”

  “Well,” said Ron, “on any given sphere all great circles intersect each other—or lie congruent.”

  Rydra laughed. “Just like that, hey? Are there any other circles on a sphere that have to intersect no matter how you maneuver them?”

  “I think you can push around any other circles so that they’re equidistant at all points and don’t touch. But all great circles have to have at least two points in common.”

  “Think about that for a minute and look at these marbles, all being pulled along great circles.”

  Mollya suddenly floated back from the wall with an expression of recognition and brought her hands together. She blurted something in Kiswahili, and Rydra laughed. “That’s right,” she said. To Ron’s and Calli’s bewilderment she translated: “They’ll move toward each other and their paths’ll intersect.”

  Calli’s eyes widened. “That’s right, at exactly a quarter of the way around our orbit, they should have flattened out to a circular plane.”

  “Lying along the plane of our orbit,” Ron finished.

  Mollya frowned and made a stretching motion with her hands. “Yeah,” Ron said, “a distorted circular plane with a tail at each end, from which we can compute which way the earth lies.”

  “Clever, huh?” Rydra moved back into the corridor opening. “I figure we can do this once, then fire our rockets enough to blast us maybe seventy or eighty miles either up or down without hurting anything. From that we can get the length of our orbits, as well as our speed. That’ll be all the information we need to locate ourselves in relation to the nearest major gravitational influence. From there we can jump stasis. All our communications instruments for stasis are in working order. We can signal for help and pull in some replacements from a stasis station.”

  The amazed Navigators joined her in the corridor. “Count down,” Rydra said.

  At zero Ron released the magnetic walls. Slowly the marbles began to drift, lining up slowly.

  “Guess you learn something every day,” Calli said. “If you’d asked me, I would have said we were stuck here forever. And knowing things like this is supposed to be my job. Where did you get the idea?”

  “From the word for ‘great circle’ in…another language.”

  “Language speaking tongue?” Mollya asked. “You mean?”

  “Well,” Rydra took out a metal tracing plate and a stylus. “I’m simplifying it a little, but let me show you.” She marked the plate. “Let’s say the word for circle is: O. This language has a melody system to illustrate comparatives. We’ll represent this by the diacritical marks: ˇ, ¯, and ˆ, respectively, means smallest, ordinary, and biggest. So what would Ô mean?”

  “Smallest possible circle?” said Calli. “That’s a single point.”

  Rydra nodded. “Now, when referring to a circle on a sphere, suppose the word for just an ordinary circle is O followed by either of two symbols, one of which means not touching anything else, the other of which means crossing—11 or X. What would ŌX mean?”

  “Ordinary circle that intersects,” said Ron.

  “And because all great circles intersect, in this language the word for great circle is always ŌX. It carries the information right in the word. Just like bus stop or foxhole carry information in English that la gare or le terrier—comparable words in French—lack. ‘Great Circle’ carries some information with it, but not the right information to get us out of the jam we’re in. We have to go to another language in order to think about the problem clearly without going through all sorts of roundabout paths for the proper aspects of what we want to deal with.”

  “What language is this?” asked Calli.

  “I don’t know its real name. For now it’s called Babel-17. From what little I know about it already, most of its words carry more information about the things they refer to than any four or five languages I know put together—and in less space.” She gave a brief translation for Mollya.

  “Who speak?” Mollya asked, determined to stick to her minimal English.

  Rydra bit the inside of her lip. When she’d asked herself that question, her stomach would tighten, her hands start toward something and the yearning for an answer grow nearly to pain in the back of her throat. It happened now; it faded. “I don’t know. But I wish I did. That’s what the main reason for this trip is, to find out.”

  “Babel-17,” Ron repeated.

  One of the platoon tube-boys coughed behind th
em.

  “What is it, Carlos?”

  Squat, taurine, with a lot of curly black hair, Carlos had big, loose muscles, and a slight lisp. “Captain, could I show you something?” He shifted from side to side in adolescent awkwardness, scuffing his bare soles, heat-callused from climbing over the drive tubes, against the door sill. “Something down in the tubes. I think you should take a look at it yourself.”

  “Did Slug tell you to get me?”

  Carlos prodded behind his ear with a gnawed thumbnail. “Um-hm.”

  “You three can take care of this business, can’t you?”

  “Sure, Captain.” Calli looked at the closing marbles.

  Rydra ducked after Carlos. They rode down the ladder lift and hunched through the low-ceilinged causeway.

  “Down here,” Carlos said, hesitantly taking the lead beneath arched bus bars. At a mesh platform he stopped and opened a component cabinet in the wall. “See.” He removed a board of printed circuits. “There.” A thin crack ran across the plastic surface. “It’s been broken.”

  “How?” Rydra asked.

  “Like this.” He took the plate in both hands and made a bending gesture.

  “Sure it didn’t crack by itself?”

  “It can’t,” Carlos said. “When it’s in place, it’s supported too well. You couldn’t crack it with a sledge hammer. This panel carries all the communication circuits.”

  Rydra nodded.

  “The gyroscopic field deflectors for all our regular space maneuvering…” He opened another door and took out another panel. “Here.”

  Rydra ran her fingernail along the crack in the second plate. “Someone in the ship broke these,” she said. “Take them to the shop. Tell Lizzy when she finishes reprinting them to bring them to me and I’ll put them in. I’ll give her the marbles back then.”

  2

  DROP A GEM IN thick oil. The brilliance yellows slowly, ambers, goes red at last, dies. That was the leap into hyperstatic space.

  At the computer console, Rydra pondered the charts. The dictionary had doubled since the trip began. Satisfaction filled one side of her mind like a good meal. Words, and their easy patterning, facile always on her tongue, in her fingers, ordered themselves for her, revealing, defining, and revealing.

  And there was a traitor. The question, a vacuum where no information would come to answer who or what or why, made an emptiness on the other side of her brain, agonizing to collapse. Someone had deliberately broken those plates. Lizzy said so, too. What words for this? The names of the entire crew, and by each, a question mark.

  Fling a jewel into a glut of jewels. This was the leap from hyperstasis into the area of the Alliance War Yards at Armsedge.

  At the communication board, she put on the Sensory Helmet. “Do you want to translate for me?”

  The indicator light blinked acceptance. Each discorporate observer perceived the details of the gravitational and electromagnetic flux of the stasis currents for a certain frequency with all his senses, each in his separate range. Those details were myriad, and the pilot sailed the ship through those currents as sailing ships winded the liquid ocean. But the helmet made a condensation that the captain could view for a general survey of the matrix, reduced to terms that would leave the corporate viewer sane.

  She opened the helmet, covering her eyes, ears, and nose.

  Flung through loops of blue and wrung with indigo, drifted the complex of stations and planetoids making up the War Yards. A musical hum punctured with bursts of static sounded over the earphones. The olfactory emitters gave a confused odor of perfumes and hot oil charged with the bitter smell of burning citrus peel. With three of her senses filled, she was loosed from the reality of the cabin to drift through sensory abstractions. It took nearly a minute to collect her sensations, to begin their interpretation.

  “All right. What am I looking at?”

  “The lights are the various planetoids and ring stations that make up the War Yards,” the Eye explained to her. “That bluish color to the left is a radar net they have spread out toward Stellarcenter Forty-two. Those red flashes in the upper right-hand corner are just a reflection of Bellatrix from a half-glazed solar-disk rotating four degrees outside your field of vision.”

  “What’s that low humming?” Rydra asked.

  “The ship’s drive,” the Ear explained. “Just ignore it. I’ll block it out if you want.”

  Rydra nodded, and the hum ceased.

  “That clicking—” the Ear began.

  “—is morse code,” Rydra finished. “I recognize that. It must be two radio amateurs that want to keep off the visual circuits.”

  “That’s right,” the Ear confirmed.

  “What stinks like that?”

  “The overall smell is just Bellatrix’s gravitational field. You can’t receive the olfactory sensations in stereo, but the burnt lemon peel is the power plant that’s located in that green glare right ahead of you.”

  “Where do we dock?”

  “In the sound of the E-minor triad.”

  “In the hot oil you can smell bubbling to your left.”

  “Home in on that white circle.”

  Rydra switched to the pilot. “Okay, Brass, take her in.”

  The saucer-disk slid down the ramp as she balanced easily in the four-fifths gravity. A breeze through the artificial twilight pushed her hair back from her shoulders. Around her stretched the major arsenal of the Alliance. Momentarily she pondered the accident of birth that had seated her firmly inside the Alliance’s realm. Born a galaxy away, she might as easily have been an Invader. Her poems were popular on both sides. That was upsetting. She put the thought away. Here, gliding the Alliance War Yards, it was not clever to be upset over that.

  “Captain Wong, you come under the auspices of General Forester.”

  She nodded as her saucer stopped.

  “He forwarded us information that you are at present the expert on Babel-17.”

  She nodded once more. Now the other saucer paused before hers.

  “I’m very happy then, to meet you, and for any assistance I can offer, please ask.”

  She extended her hand. “Thank you, Baron Ver Dorco.”

  Black eyebrows raised and the slash of mouth curved in the dark face. “You read heraldry?” He raised long fingers to the shield on his chest.

  “I do.”

  “An accomplishment, Captain. We live in a world of isolated communities, each hardly touching its neighbor, each speaking, as it were, a different language.”

  “I speak many.”

  The Baron nodded. “Sometimes I believe, Captain Wong, that without the Invasion, something for the Alliance to focus its energies upon, our society would disintegrate. Captain Wong—” He stopped, and the fine lines of his face shifted, contracted to concentration, then a sudden opening. “Rydra Wong…?”

  She nodded, smiling at his smile, yet wary before what the recognition would mean.

  “I didn’t realize—” He extended his hand as though he were meeting her all over again. “But, of course—” The surface of his manner shaled away, and had she never seen this transformation before she would have warmed to his warmth. “Your books, I want you to know—” The sentence trailed in a slight shaking of the head. Dark eyes too wide; lips, in their humor, too close to a leer; hands seeking one another: it all spoke to her of a disquieting appetite for her presence, a hunger for something she was or might be, a ravenous—” Dinner at my house is served at seven.” He interrupted her thought with unsettling appropriateness. “You will dine with the Baroness and myself this evening.”

  “Thank you. But I wanted to discuss with my crew—”

  “I extend the invitation to your entire entourage. We have a spacious house, conference rooms at your disposal, as well as entertainment, certainly less confined than your ship.” The tongue, purplish and flickering behind white, white teeth; the brown lines of his lips, she thought, form words as languidly as the slow mandibles of the canniba
l mantis.

  “Please come a little early so we can prepare you—”

  She caught her breath, then felt foolish; a faint narrowing of his eyes told her he had registered, though not understood, her start.

  “—for your tour through the Yards. General Forester has suggested you be made privy to all our efforts against the Invaders. This is quite an honor, Madam. There are many well-seasoned officers at the Yards who have not seen some of the things you will be shown. A good deal of it will probably be tedious, I dare say. In my opinion, it’s stuffing you with a lot of trivial tidbits. But some of our attempts have been rather ingenious. We keep our imaginations simmering.”

  This man brings out the paranoid in me, she thought. I don’t like him. “I’d prefer not to impose on you, Baron. There are some matters on my ship that I must—”

  “Do come. Your work here will be much facilitated if you accept my hospitality, I assure you. A woman of your talent and accomplishment would be an honor to my house. And recently I have been starved—” dark lips slid together over gleaming teeth—” for intelligent conversation.”

  She felt her jaw clamp involuntarily on a third ceremonious refusal. But the Baron was saying: “I will expect you, and your crew, leisurely, before seven.”

  The saucer-disk slid away over the concourse. Rydra looked back at the ramp where her ship waited, silhouetted against the false evening. Her disk began to negotiate the slope back to the Rimbaud.

  “Well,” she said to the little albino cook who had just come out of his pressure bandage the day before, “you’re off tonight. Slug, the crew’s going out to dinner. See if you can brush the kids up on their table manners—make sure everyone knows which knife to eat his peas with, and all that.”

  “The salad fork is the little one on the outside,” the Slug announced suavely, turning to the platoon.

  “And what about the little one outside that?” Allegra asked.

  “That’s for oysters.”

  “But suppose they don’t serve oysters?”

  Flop rubbed his under lip with the knuckle of his thumb. “I guess you could pick your teeth with it.”

  Brass dropped a paw on Rydra’s shoulder. “How you feel, Ca’tain?”