Babel-17

by Samuel R. Delany

…Here is the hub of ambiguity. Electric spectra splash across the street. Equivocation knots the shadowed features of boys who are not boys; a quirk of darkness shrivels a full mouth to senility or pares it to a razor-edge, pours acid across an amber cheek, fingers a crotch, or smashes in the pelvic arch and wells a dark clot oozing on a chest dispelled with motion or a flare of light that swells the lips and dribbles them with blood. They say the hustlers paint their lips with blood. They say the same crowd surges up the street and surges down again, like driftwood borne tidewise ashore and sucked away with backwash, only to slap into the sand again, only to be jerked out and spun away. Driftwood; the narrow hips, the liquid eyes, the wideflung shoulders and the rough-cast hands, the gray-faced jackals kneeling to their prey. The colors disappear at break of day when stragglers toward the west riverdocks meet young sailors ambling shipward on the street… —from Prism and Lens

IT’S A PORT CITY. Here fumes rust the sky, the General thought. Industrial gases flushed the evening with oranges, salmons, purples with too much red. West, ascending and descending transports, shuttling cargoes to stellarcenters and satellites, lacerated the clouds. It’s a rotten poor city too, thought the General, turning the corner by the garbage-strewn curb. Since the Invasion six ruinous embargoes for months apiece had strangled this city whose lifeline must pulse with interstellar commerce to survive. Sequestered, how could this city exist? Six times in twenty years he’d asked himself that. Answer? It couldn’t. Panics, riots, burnings, twice cannibalism— The General looked from the silhouetted loading-towers that jutted behind the rickety monorail to the grimy buildings. The streets were smaller here, cluttered with Transport workers, loaders, a few stellarmen in green uniforms, and the horde of pale, proper men and women who managed the intricate sprawl of customs operations. They are quiet now, intent on home or work, the General thought. Yet all these people have lived for two decades under the Invasion. They’ve starved during the embargoes, broken windows, looted, run screaming before firehoses, torn flesh from a corpse’s arm with decalcified teeth. Who is this animal man? He asked himself the abstract question to blur the lines of memory. It was easier, being a general, to ask about the “animal man” than about the woman who had sat in the middle of the sidewalk ...

Pale and proper men and women now, who spoke softly, who always hesitated before they let an expression fix their faces, with pale, proper, patriotic ideas: work for victory over the Invaders; Alona Star and Kip Rhyak were great in “Stellar Holliday” but Ronald Quar was the best serious actor around. They listened to Hi Lite’s music (or did they listen, wondered the General, during those slow dances where no one touched). A position in Customs was a good secure job. Working directly in Transport was probably more exciting and fun to watch in the movies; but really, such strange people— Those with more intelligence and sophistication discussed Rydra Wong’s poetry. They spoke of the Invasion often, with some hundred phrases consecrated by twenty years’ repetition on newscasts and in the papers. They referred to the embargoes seldom, and only by the one word. Take any of them, take any million. Who are they? What do they want? What would they say if given a chance to say anything?

Rydra Wong has become this age’s voice. The General recalled the glib line from a hyperbolic review. Paradoxical: a military leader with a military goal, he was going to meet Rydra Wong now. The streetlights came on and his image glazed on the plate glass window of the bar. That’s right, I’m not wearing my uniform this evening. He saw a tall, muscular man with the authority of half a century in his craggy face. He was uncomfortable in the gray civilian suit. Till age thirty, the physical impression he had left with people was “big and bumbling.” Afterwards—the change had coincided with the Invasion—it was “massive and authoritarian.” Had Rydra Wong come to see him at Administrative Alliance Headquarters, he would have felt secure. But he was in civvies, not in stellarman-green. The bar was new to him. And she was the most famous poet in five explored galaxies. For the first time in a long while he felt bumbling again. He went inside. And whispered, “My God, she’s beautiful,” without even having to pick her from among the other women. “I didn’t know she was so beautiful, not from the pictures…” She turned to him (as the figure in the mirror behind the counter caught sight of him ...

A language, however, has its own internal logic, its own grammar, its own way of putting thoughts together with words that span various spectra of meaning. There is no key you can plug in to unlock the exact meaning. At best you can get a close approximation.”

“Why did you leave?” “I’ve given you two reasons. A third is simply that when I mastered the knack, I wanted to use it for my own purposes. At nineteen, I quit the Military and, well, got…married, and started writing seriously. Three years later my first book came out.” She shrugged, smiled. “For anything after that, read the poems. It’s all there.” “And on the worlds of five galaxies, now, people delve your imagery and meaning for the answers to the riddles of language, love, and isolation.” The three words jumped his sentence like vagabonds on a boxcar. She was before him, and was talking; here, divorced from the military, he felt desperately isolated; and he was desperately in…No! That was impossible and ridiculous and too simple to explain what coursed and pulsed behind his eyes, inside his hands. “Another drink?” Automatic defense. But she will take it for automatic politeness. Will she? The bartender came, left. “The worlds of five galaxies,” she repeated. “That’s so strange. I’m only twenty-six.” Her eyes fixed somewhere behind the mirror. She was only half-through her first drink. “By the time Keats was your age, he was dead.” She shrugged. “This is an odd epoch. It takes heroes very suddenly, very young, then drops them just as quickly.”

He stood in the static beam of her smile. I must go now, he thought desperately. Oh, let me say something more—“Fine, Miss Wong. I’ll speak to you then.” Something more, something— He wrenched his body away. (I must turn from her.) Say one thing more, thank you, be you, love you. He walked to the door, his thoughts quieting: Who is she? Oh, the things that should have been said. I have been brusque, military, efficient. But the luxuriance of thought and word I would have given her. The door swung open and evening brushed blue fingers on his eyes. My god, he thought, as coolness struck his face, all that inside me and she doesn’t know! I didn’t communicate a thing! Somewhere in the depths the words, not a thing, you’re still safe. But stronger on the surface was the outrage at his own silence. Didn’t communicate a thing at all

She shook her head, shook it again. Dr. T’mwarba locked his fingers and leaned back. Suddenly Rydra said in an even voice: “Now I do have some idea of what you’re trying to say, dear, but you’ll have to put it in words yourself. That’s what you were about to say, Mocky, wasn’t it?” T’mwarba raised the white hedges of his eyebrows. “Yes. It was. You say you didn’t read my mind? You’ve demonstrated this to me a dozen times—” “I know what you’re trying to say; and you don’t know what I’m trying to say. It’s not fair!” She nearly rose from her seat. They said in unison: “That’s why you’re such a fine poet.” Rydra went on, “I know, Mocky. I have to work things out carefully in my head and put them in my poems so people will understand. But that’s not what I’ve been doing for the past ten years. You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can’t express—and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn’t hurt anymore: that’s my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.” “The voice of your age,” said T’mwarba.

She came back with something neither modest nor couth. Dr. T’mwarba bit the inside of his lip and wondered if she saw. “I’m not a little girl,” she said. “Besides, he wasn’t thinking anything uncouth. As I said, I was flattered by the whole thing. When I pulled my little joke, I was just trying to let him know how much in key we were. I thought he was charming. And if he had been able to see as clearly as I could he would have known I had nothing but good feeling for him. Only when he left—” Dr. T’mwarba heard roughness work back into her voice. “—when he left, the last thing he thought was, ‘She doesn’t know; I haven’t communicated a thing to her.’ ” Her eyes darkened—no, she bent slightly forward and half-dropped her upper lids so that her eyes looked darker. He had watched that happen thousands of times since the scrawny near-autistic twelve-year-old girl had been sent to him for neurotherapy, which had developed into psychotherapy, and then into friendship. This was the first time he’d understood the mechanics of the effect. Her precision of observation had inspired him before to look more closely at others. Only since therapy had officially ended had it come full circle and made him look more closely at her. What did the darkening signify other than change? He knew there were myriad marks of personality about him that she read with a microscope. Wealthy, worldly, he had known many people equal to her in reputation. The reputation did not awe him. Often, however, she d...

Something else was happening in her Oriental face, and he strained to catch it. “Yes?” “—Babel-17.” “The language?” “Yes. You know what I used to call my ‘knack’?” “You mean you suddenly understood the language?” “Well, General Forester had just told me what I had was not a monologue, but a dialogue, which I hadn’t known before. That fitted in with some other things I had in the back of my mind. I realized I could tell where the voices changed myself. And then—” “Do you understand it?” “I understand some of it better than I did this afternoon. There’s something about the language itself that scares me even more than General Forester.” Puzzlement fixed itself to T’mwarba’s face. “About the language itself?” She nodded. “What?” The muscle in her cheek jumped again. “For one thing, I think I know where the next accident is going to be.” “Accident?” “Yes. The next sabotage that the Invaders are planning, if it is the Invaders, which I’m not sure of. But the language itself—it’s…it’s strange.” “How?” “Small,” she said. “Tight. Close together—That doesn’t mean anything to you, does it? In a language, I mean?” “Compactness?” asked Dr. T’mwarba. “I would think it’s a good quality in a spoken language.” “Yes,” and the sibilant became a breath. “Mocky, I am scared!” “Why?” “Because I’m going to try to do something, and I don’t know if I can or not.” “If it’s worth trying, you should be a little afraid. What is it?” “I decided it back in the bar, and I figured out I’d better talk to ...

“Why? Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought, Mocky. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language. The form of this language is…amazing.” “What amazes you?” “Mocky, when you learn another tongue, you learn the way another people see the world, th...

“You shouldn’t be afraid of him,” Rydra told the Officer. “But he’s—” During his search for a word, he wondered, How did she know? “Where in five hells did he come from?” “He’s an Earthman. Though I believe he was born en route from Arcturus to one of the Centauris. His mother was a Slug, I think, if he wasn’t lying about that too. Lome tells tall tales.” “You mean all that getup is cosmetisurgery?” “Um-hm.” Rydra started down the stairs. “But why the devil do they do that to themselves? They’re all so weird. That’s why decent people won’t have anything to do with them.” “Sailors used to get tattoos. Besides, Lome has nothing else to do. I doubt he’s had a pilot’s job in forty years.”

“Call your Three over,” Rydra said. “Why?” “I’m looking for a full crew.” Calli wrinkled his forehead. “We don’t got no One anymore.” “You’re going to mope around here forever? Go to the Morgue.” Calli humphed. “You wanna see my Three, you come on.” Rydra shrugged in acquiescence, and the Customs Officer followed behind them. “Hey, stupid, swing around.” The kid who turned on the bar stool was maybe nineteen. The Customs Officer thought of a snarl of metal bands. Calli was a large, comfortable man— “Captain Wong, this is Ron—best Three to come out of this Solar System.” —but Ron was small, thin, with uncannily sharp muscular definition: pectorals like scored metal plates beneath drawn wax skin; stomach like ridged hosing, arms like braided cables. Even the facial muscles stood at the back of the jaw and jammed against the separate columns of his neck. He was unkempt and towheaded and sapphire-eyed, but the only cosmetisurgery evident was the bright rose growing on his shoulder. He flung out a quick smile and touched his forehead with a forefinger in salute. His nails were nub-gnawed on fingers like knotted lengths of white rope. “Captain Wong is looking for a crew.” Ron shifted on the stool, raising his head a little; every other muscle in his body moved too, like snakes under milk. The Customs Officer saw Rydra’s eyes widen. Not understanding her reaction, he ignored it. “Don’t got no One,” Ron said. His smile was quick and sad again. “Suppose I found a One for you?” The ...

Smoke rolled in the globe— “That’s our Brass!” whispered Calli. —and Brass yawned and shook his head, ivory saber teeth glistening with spittle, muscles humped on shoulders and arms; brass claws unsheathed six inches from yellow plush paws. Bunched bands on his belly bent above them. The barbed tail beat on the globe’s wall. His mane, sheared to prevent handholds, ran like water. Calli grabbed the Customs Officer’s shoulder. “Snap your fingers, man! That’s our Brass!” The Customs Officer, who had never been able to, nearly broke his hand trying.

“You can really judge a pilot by watching him wrestle?” the officer inquired of Rydra. She nodded. “In the ship, the pilot’s nervous system is connected directly with the controls. The whole hyperstasis transit consists of him literally wrestling the stasis shifts. You judge by his reflexes, his ability to control his artificial body. An experienced Transporter can tell exactly how he’ll work with hyperstasis currents.”

“Closest way to the Discorporate Sector is through there.” The streets narrowed about them, twisting through one another, deserted. Then a stretch of concrete where metal turrets rose. Crossed and recrossed, wires webbed them. Pylons of bluish light dropped half shadows. “Is this…?” the Customs Officer began. Then he was quiet. Walking out, they slowed their steps. Against the darkness red light shot between towers. “What…?” “Just a transfer. They go on all night,” Calli explained. Green lightning crackled to their left. “Transfer?” “It’s a quick exchange of energies resulting from the relocation of discorporate states,” the Navigator Two volunteered glibly. “But I still don’t…” They had moved between the pylons now, when a flickering coalesced. Silver latticed with red fire glimmered through industrial smog. Three figures formed: the women’s sequined skeletons glittered toward them, casting hollow eyes. Kittens clawed the Customs Officer’s back, for strut work pylons gleamed behind the apparitional bellies. “The faces,” he whispered. “As soon as you look away, you can’t remember what they look like. When you look at them, they look like people, but when you look away—” He caught his breath as another passed. “You can’t remember…!” He stared after them. “Dead?” He shook his head. “You know I’ve been approving psyche-indices on Transport workers corporate and discorporate for ten years. And I’ve never been close enough to speak to a discorporate soul. Oh, I’ve seen pictures...

Calli suddenly hooked the Officer’s neck with his hand and pulled him close to his own pocked face. “You don’t know anything, Customs.” The tone was of their first exchange in the café. “Aw, you hide in your Customs cage, cage hid in the safe gravity of Earth, Earth held firm by the sun, sun fixed headlong toward Vega, all in the predicted tide of this spiral arm—” He gestured across night where the Milky Way would run over a less bright city. “And you never break free!” Suddenly he pushed the little spectacled red head away. “Ehhh! You have nothing to say to me!” The bereaved navigator caught a guy cable slanting from support to concrete. It twanged. The low note set something loose in the Officer’s throat which reached his mouth with the metal taste of outrage. He would have spat it, but Rydra’s copper eyes were now as close to his face as the hostile, pitted visage had been. She said: “He was part,” the words lean, calm, her eyes intent on not losing his, “of a triple, a close, precarious, emotional, and sexual relation with two other people. And one of them has just died.” The edge of her tone hued away the bulk of the Officer’s anger; but a sliver escaped him: “Perverts!” Ron put his head to the side, his musculature showing clear the double of hurt and bewilderment. “There’re some jobs,” he echoed Calli’s syntax, “some jobs on a transport ship you just can’t give to two people alone. The jobs are too complicated.” “I know.’ ” Then he thought, I’ve hurt the boy, too. ...

—RECALL FROM BROKEN BANKS and color of earth breaking into clear pool water her eyes; the figure blinking her eyes and speaking. He said: “An Officer, ma’am. A Customs Officer.” Surprise at her witty return, at first hurt, then amusement following. He answered: “About ten years. How long have you been discorporate?” And she moved closer to him, her hair holding the recalled odor of. And the sharp transparent features reminding him of. More words from her, now, making him laugh. “Yes, this is all very new to me. Doesn’t the whole vagueness with which everything seems to happen get you, too?” Again her answer, both coaxing and witty. “Well, yes,” he smiled. “For you I guess it wouldn’t be.” Her ease infected him; and either she reached playfully to take his hand or he amazed himself by taking hers, and the apparition was real beneath his fingers with skin as smooth as. “You’re so forward. I mean I’m not used to young women just coming up and…behaving like this.” Her charming logic again explained it away, making him feel her near, nearer, nearing, and her banter made music, a phrase from. “Well, yes, you’re discorporate, so it doesn’t matter. But—” And her interruption was a word or a kiss or a frown or a smile, sending not humor through him now, but luminous amazement, fear, excitement; and the feel of her shape against his completely new. He fought to retain it, pattern of pressure and pressure, fading as the pressure itself faded. She was going away. She was laughing like...

WHEN THEY RETURNED, BRASS called, “Good news! We got who we wanted.” “Crew’s coming along,” commented Calli. Rydra handed him the three index cards. “They’ll report to the ship discorporate two hours before—what’s wrong?” Danil D. Appleby reached to take the cards. “I…she…” and couldn’t say anything else. “Who?” Rydra asked. The concern on her face was driving away even his remaining memories, and he resented it, memories of, of. Calli laughed. “A succubus! While we were gone, he got hustled by a succubus!” “Yeah!” from Brass. “Look at him!” Ron laughed, too. “It was a woman…I think. I can remember what I said—” “How much did she take you for?” Brass asked. “Take me?” Ron said, “I don’t think he knows.” Calli grinned at the Navigator-Three and then at the Officer. “Take a look in your billfold.” “Huh?” “Take a look.” Incredulously he reached in his pocket. The metallic envelope flipped apart in his hands. “Ten…twenty…But I had fifty in here when I left the café!” Calli slapped his thighs laughing. He loped over and encircled the Customs Officer’s shoulder. “You’ll end up a Transport man after that happens a couple of more times.” “But she…I…” The emptiness of his thefted recollections was real as any love loss. The rifled wallet seemed trivial. Tears banked his eyes. “But she was—” Confusion snarled the sentence’s end. “What was she, friend?” Calli asked. “She…was.” That was the sad entirety. “Since discor’oration, you can take it with you,” said Brass. “They try for it wi...

They left the Discorporate Sector and took the monorail through the tortuous remains of Transport Town, then along the edge of the space-field. Blackness beyond the windows was flung across with blue signal lights. Ships rose on white flares, blued through distance, and became bloody stars in the rusted sky. They joked for the first twenty minutes over the humming runners. The fluorescent ceiling dropped greenish light on their faces, in their laps. One by one, the Customs Officer watched them go silent while the side-to-side inertia became a headlong drive. He had not spoken at all, still trying to regain her face, her words, her shape. But it stayed away, frustrating as the imperative comment that leaves your mind as speech begins, and the mouth is left empty, a lost referent to love.

When they stepped onto the open platform at Thule Station, warm wind flushed from the east. The clouds had shattered under an ivory moon. Gravel and granite silvered the broken edges. Behind was the city’s red mist. Before, on broken night, rose the black Morgue. They went down the steps and walked quietly through the stone park. The garden of water and rock was eerie and empty. Nothing grew here. At the door slabbed metal without external light blotted the darkness. “How do you get in?” the Officer asked, as they climbed the shallow steps. Rydra lifted the Captain’s pendant from her neck and placed it against a small disk. Something hummed, and light divided the entrance as the doors slid back. Rydra stepped through; the rest followed. Calli stared at the metallic vaults overhead. “You know there’s enough transport meat deep-frozen in this place to service a hundred stars and all their planets.” “And Customs people too,” said the Officer. “Does anybody ever bother to call back a Customs who decided to take a rest?” Ron asked with candid ingenuousness. “Don’t know what for,” said Calli. “It’s been known to happen,” responded the Officer dryly. “Occasionally.” “More rarely than w...

They left the main lobby for the labeled corridor that sloped up through the storage chambers. It emptied them onto a platform in an indirectly lighted room, racked up its hundred-foot height with glass cases, catwalked and laddered like a spider’s den. In the coffins, dark shapes were rigid beneath frost-shot glass. “What I don’t understand about this whole business,” the Officer whispered, “is the calling back. Can anybody who dies be made corporate again? You’re right, Captain Wong, in Customs it’s almost impolite to talk about things like…this.” “Any suicide who discorporates through regular Morgue channels can be called back. But a violent death where the Morgue just retrieves the body afterward, or the run-of-the-mill senile ending that most of us hit at a hundred and fifty or so, then you’re dead forever; although there, if you pass through regular channels, your brain pattern is recorded and your thinking ability can be tapped if anyone wants it, though your consciousness is gone wherever consciousness goes.” Beside them, a twelve-foot filing crystal glowed like pink quartz. “Ron,” said Rydra. “No, Ron and Calli too.” The Navigators stepped up, puzzled. “You know some fi...

DEAR MOCKY, When you get this I’ll have taken off two hours ago. It’s a half hour before dawn and I want to talk to you, but I won’t wake you up again. I am, nostalgically enough, taking out Fobo’s old ship, the Rimbaud (the name was Muels’ idea, remember). At least, I’m familiar with it; lots of good memories here. I leave in twenty minutes. Present location: I’m sitting in a folding chair in the freight lock looking over the field. The sky is star speckled to the west, and gray to the east. Black needles of ships pattern around me. Lines of blue signal lights fade toward the south. It’s calm now. Subject of my thinking: a hectic night of crew hunting that took me all over Transport Town and out to the Morgue, through dives and glittering byways, etc. Loud and noisy at the beginning, calming to this at the end. To get a good pilot you, watch him wrestle. A trained captain can tell exactly what sort of a pilot a person will make by observing his reflexes in the arena. Only I am not that well trained. Remember what you said about muscle-reading? Maybe you were righter than you thought. Last night I ran into a kid, a Navigator, who looks like Brancusi’s graduation offering, or maybe what Michelangelo wished the human body was. He was born in Transport and knows pilot wrestling inside out, apparently. So I watched him watch my pilot wrestle, and just looking at his quivers and jerks I got a complete analysis of what was going on over my head. You know De Faure’s theory that p...

“General Forester, once I wrote a poem I’m reminded of. It was called ‘Advice to Those Who Would Love Poets.’ ” The General opened his teeth without separating his lips. “It started something like: Young man, she will gnaw out your tongue. Lady, he will steal your hands… You can read the rest. It’s in my second book. If you’re not willing to lose a poet seven times a day, it’s frustrating as hell.” He said simply: “You knew I…” “I knew and I know. And I’m glad.” The lost breath returned and an unfamiliar thing was happening to his face: he smiled. “When I was a private, Miss Wong, and we’d be confined to barracks, we’d talk about girls and girls and girls. And somebody would say about one: she was so pretty she didn’t have to give me any, just promise me some.” He let the stiffness leave his shoulders a moment, and though they actually fell half an inch, the effect was that they seemed broader by two. “That’s what I was feeling.” “Thank you for telling me,” she said. “I like you, General. And I promise I’ll still like you the next time I see you.” “I…thank you. I guess that’s all. Just thank you…for knowing and promising.” Then he said, “I have to go now, don’t I?” “We’ll be taking off in ten minutes.” “Your letter,” he said, “I’ll mail it for you.” “Thanks.” She handed it to him, he took her hand, and for the slightest moment with the slightest pressure, held her. Then he turned, left. Minutes later she watched his saucer-sled glide across the concrete, its sun-side flari...

If words are paramount I am afraid that words are all my hands have ever seen… —from Quartet

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 ...

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 reflecti...

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 cr...

She looked over the crew with gnawing discomfort. If one of the kids or officers was merely psychotically destructive, it would show up on his psyche index. There was, among them, a consciously destructive one. It hurt, like an unlocatable splinter in the sole of her foot that jabbed occasionally with the pressure of walking. She remembered how she had searched them from the night. Pride. Warm pride in the way their functions meshed as they moved her ship through the stars. The warmth was the relieved anticipation for all that could go wrong with the machine-called-the-ship, if the machine-called-the-crew were not interlocked and precise. Cool pride in another part of her mind, at the ease with which they moved by one another: the kids, inexperienced both in living and working; the adults, so near pressure situations that might have scarred their polished efficiency and made psychic burrs to snag one another. But she had chosen them; and the ship, her world, was a beautiful place to walk, work, live, for a journey’s length. But there was a traitor. That shorted something. Somewhere in Eden, now…she recalled, again looking over the crew. Somewhere in Eden, now, a worm, a worm. Those cracked plates told her: the worm wanted to destroy not just her, but the ship, its crew, and contents, slowly. No blades plunged in the night, no shots from around a corner, no cord looped on the throat as she entered a dark cabin. Babel-17, how good a language would it be to argue with for you...

“GROSS, UNCIVILIZED WEAPONS.” THE Baron gestured toward the row of plastic cylinders increasing in size along the rack. “It’s a shame to waste time on such clumsy contraptions. The little one there can demolish an area of about fifty square miles. The big ones leave a crater twenty-seven miles deep and a hundred and fifty across. Barbaric. I frown on their use. That one on the left is more subtle: it explodes once with enough force to demolish a good size building, but the bomb casing itself is hidden and unhurt under the rubble. Six hours later it explodes again and does the damage of a fair-sized atomic bomb. This leaves the victims enough time to concentrate their reclamation forces, all sorts of reconstruction workers, Red Cross nurses, or whatever the Invaders call them, lots of experts determining the size of the damage. Then poof. A delayed hydrogen explosion, and a good thirty or forty miles crater. It doesn’t do as much physical damage as even the smallest of these others, but it gets rid of a lot of equipment and busybody dogooders. Still, a schoolboy’s weapon. I keep them in my own personal collection just to show them we have standard fare.” She followed him through the archway into the next hall. There were filing cabinets along the wall and a single display case in the center of the room. “Now here is one I’m justly proud of.” The Baron walked to the case and the transparent walls fell apart. “What,” Rydra asked, “exactly is it?” “What does it look like?” “A…...

Ask him what’s in that room over there, she said to herself, and would have dismissed the passing curiosity, but she was thinking in Basque: it was a message from her discorporate bodyguard, invisible beside her. “When I was a child, Baron—” she moved toward the door—“soon after I came to Earth, I was taken to the circus. It was the first time I had ever seen so many things so close together that were so fascinating. I wouldn’t go home till almost an hour after they had intended to leave. What do you have in this room?” Surprise in the little movement in the muscles of his forehead. “Show me.” He bowed his head in mocking, semi-formal acquiescence. “Modern warfare can be fought on so many delightfully different levels,” he continued, walking back to her side as if no interruption of the tour had been suggested. “One wins a battle by making sure one’s troops have enough blunderbusses and battle axes like the ones you saw in the first room; or by the well-placed six-inch length of vanadium wire in a Type 27-QX communications unit. With the proper orders delayed, the encounter never takes place. Hand-to-hand weapons, survival kit, plus training, room, and board: three thousand credits per enlisted stellarman over a period of two years active duty. For a garrison of fifteen hundred men that’s an outlay of four million, five hundred credits. That same garrison will live in and fight from three hyperstasis battleships which, fully equipped, run about a million and a half credits...

CAPTAIN WONG! I AM delighted.” The Baroness extended her plump hand, of a pink and gray hue suggesting something parboiled. Her puffy freckled shoulders heaved beneath the straps of an evening dress tasteful enough over her distended figure, still grotesque. “We have so little excitement here at the Yards that when someone as distinguished as yourself pays us a visit…” She let the sentence end in what would have been an ecstatic smile, but the weight of her doughy cheeks distorted it into a porcine pastiche of itself. Rydra held the soft, malleable fingers as short a time as politeness allowed and returned the smile. She remembered, as a little girl, being obliged not to cry through punishment. Having to smile was worse. The Baroness seemed a muffled, vast, vacuous silence. The small muscle shifts, those counter communications that she was used to in direct conversation, were blunted in the Baroness under the fat. Even though the voice came from the heavy lips in strident little screeches, it was as though they talked through blankets.

“There. There, that is why I’m so glad you and your crew came to us this evening. You bring something so cool and pleasing, so fresh, so crisp.” “You speak about us as though we were a salad.” Rydra laughed. In the Baroness the “appetite” was not so menacing. “I dare say if you stayed here long enough we would devour you, if you let us. What you bring we are very hungry for.” “What is it?” They arrived at the bar, then turned with their drinks. The Baroness’s face strained toward hardness. “Well, you…you come to us and immediately we start to learn things, things about you, and ultimately about ourselves.” “I don’t understand.” “Take your Navigator. He likes his drinks big and all the hors d’oeuvres except the anchovies. That’s more than I know about the likes and dislikes of anyone else in the room. You offer Scotch, they drink Scotch. You offer tequila, tequila they then down by the gallon. And just a moment ago I discovered—” she shook her supine hand—“that it’s all in the wrist. I never knew that before.” “We’re used to talking to each other.” “Yes, but you tell the important things. What you like, what you don’t like, how you do things. Do you really want to be introduced to all those stuffy men and women who kill people?” “Not really.” “Didn’t think so. And I don’t want to bother, myself. Oh, there are three or four here whom I think you would like. But I’ll see that you meet them before you leave.” She barreled into the crowd.

Tides, Rydra thought. Oceans. Hyperstasis currents. Or the movement of people in a large room. She drifted along the least resistant ways that pulsed open, then closed as someone moved to meet someone, to get a drink, to leave a conversation. Then there was a corner, a spiral stair. She climbed, pausing as she came around the second turn to watch the crowd beneath. There was a double door ajar at the top, a breeze. She stepped outside. Violet had been replaced by artful, cloud-streaked purple. Soon the planetoid’s chromadome would simulate night. Moist vegetation lipped the railing. At one end, the vines had completely covered the white stone. “Captain?” Ron, shadowed and brushed with leaves, sat in the corner of the balcony, hugging his knees. Skin is not silver, she thought, yet whenever I see him that way, curled up in himself, I picture a knot of white metal. He lifted his chin from his kneecaps and put his back against the verdant hedge so there were leaves in his corn-silk hair. “What’re you doing?” “Too many people.” She nodded, watching him press his shoulders downward, watching his triceps leap on the bone, then still. With each breath in the young gnarled body, the tiny movements sang to her. She listened to the singing for nearly half a minute while he watched her, sitting still, yet always the tiny entrancements. The rose on his shoulder whispered against the leaves. When she had listened to the muscular music awhile, she asked: “Trouble between you, Mollya, an...

Real, Grimy, and exiled, he eludes us. I would show him books and bridges. I would make a language we could all speak. No blond fantasy Mother has sent to plague us in the Spring, he has his own bad dreams, needs work, gets drunk, maybe would not have chosen to be beautiful. —from The Navigators

You have imposed upon me a treaty of silence. —from The Song of Liadan

ABSTRACT THOUGHTS IN A blue room: Nominative, genitive, elative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, illative, instructive, abessive, adessive, inessive, essive, allative, translative, comitative. Sixteen cases to the Finnish noun. Odd, some languages get by with only singular and plural. The North American Indian languages even failed to distinguish number. Except Sioux, in which there was a plural only for animate objects. The blue room was round and warm and smooth. No way to say warm in French. There was only hot and tepid. If there’s no word for it, how do you think about it? And, if there isn’t the proper form, you don’t have the how even if you have the words. Imagine, in Spanish, having to assign a gender to every object: dog, table, tree, can opener. Imagine, in Hungarian, not being able to assign a gender to anything: he, she, it all the same word. Thou art my friend, but you are my king; thus the distinctions of Elizabeth the First’s English. But with some oriental languages, which all but dispense with gender and number, you are my friend, you are my parent, and YOU are my priest, and YOU are my king, and YOU are my servant, and You are my servant whom I’m going to fire tomorrow if You don’t watch it, and YOU are my king whose policies I totally disagree with and have sawdust in YOUR head instead of brains, YOUR highness, and YOU may be my friend, but I’m still gonna smack YOU up side the head if YOU ever say that to me again: and who the hell ...

What’s your name? she thought in a round warm blue room. Thoughts without a name in a blue room: Ursula, Priscilla, Barbara, Mary, Mona, and Natica: respectively, Bear, Old Lady, Chatterbox, Bitter, Monkey, and Buttock. Name. Names? What’s in a name? What name am I in? In my father’s father’s land, his name would come first, Wong Rydra. In Mollya’s home, I would not bear my father’s name at all, but my mother’s. Words are names for things. In Plato’s time things were names for ideas—what better description of the Platonic Ideal? But were words names for things, or was that just a bit of semantic confusion? Words were symbols for whole categories of things, where a name was put to a single object: a name on something that requires a symbol jars, making humor. A symbol on something that takes a name jars, too: a memory that contained a torn window shade, his liquored breath, her outrage, and crumpled clothing wedged behind a chipped, cheap night table, “All right, woman, come here!” and she had whispered, with her hands achingly tight on the brass bar, “My name is Rydra!” An individual, a thing apart from its environment, and apart from all things in that environment; an individual was a type of thing for which symbols were inadequate, and so names were invented. I am invented. I am not a round warm blue room. I am someone in that room; I am—

Her lids had been half-closed on her eyeballs. She opened them and came up suddenly against a restraining web. It knocked her breath out, and she fell back, turning about to look at the room. No. She didn’t “look at the room.” She “somethinged at the something.” The first something was a tiny vocable that implied an immediate, but passive, perception that could be aural or olfactory as well as visual. The second something was three equally tiny phonemes that blended at different musical pitches: one, an indicator that fixed the size of the chamber at roughly twenty-five feet cubical, the second identifying the color and probable substance of the walls—some blue metal—while the third was at once a placeholder for particles that should denote the room’s function when she discovered it, and a sort of grammatical tag by which she could refer to the whole experience with only the one symbol for as long as she needed. All four sounds took less time on her tongue and in her mind than the one clumsy diphthong in “room.” Babel-17; she had felt it before with other languages, the opening, the widening, the mind forced to sudden growth. But this, this was like the sudden focusing of a lens...

Where had she been? Anticipation, excitement, fear! She pulled her mind back into English. Thinking in Babel-17 was like suddenly seeing all the way down through water to the bottom of a well that a moment ago you’d ...

It took her a blink to register the others. Brass hung in the large hammock at the far wall—she saw the tines of one yellow claw over the rim. The two smaller hammocks on the other side must have been platoon kids. Above one edge she saw shiny black hair as a head turned in sleep: Carlos. She couldn’t see the third. Curiosity made a small, unfriendly fist on something important in her lower abdomen. Then the wall faded. She had been about to try and fix herself,...

Rydra waited for them to speak. A word would release identification: Alliance or Invader. Her mind was ready to spring on whatever tongue they spoke, to extract what she knew of its thinking habits, tendencies toward logical ambiguities, absence of presence of verbal rigor, in whatever areas she might take advantage of—

Rydra watched, fascinated, as yellow lights engaged the red, which still swept hypnotically along their grid, net, web— Webbing! The picture flipped over in her mind and the other side had all the missing lines. The grid was identical to the three-way web she had torn off the hammock hours before, with the added factor of timing, because the strands were the paths of ships, not strings; but it worked the same way. She snatched up a microphone from the desk. “Tarik!” The word took forever to slide from post-dental, to palatal stop, beside the sounds that danced through her brain now. She barked at the Navigators beside her: “Calli, Mollya, Ron, coordinate the battle area for me.” “Huh?” said Calli. “All right.” He began to adjust the dial of the stellarimeter in his palm. Slow motion, she thought. They’re all moving in slow motion. She knew what should be done, must be done, and watched the situation changing. “Rydra Wong, Tarik is occupied,” came the Butcher’s gravelly voice. Calli said over his shoulder: “Coordinates 3-B, 41-F, and 9-K. Pretty quick, huh?” It seemed she’d asked for them an hour ago.

“All right, Cord, to be lord of this black barrack, 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, swung 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. 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 to frangent. Now you hear the wrong cord-song, to instruct you. Assassin, pass in…”

“Butcher, there are certain ideas which have words for them. If you don’t know the words, you can’t know the ideas. And if you don’t have the idea, you don’t have the answer.”

“The word you four times, yes? Still nothing unclear, and you means nothing.” She sighed. “That’s because I was using the word phatically—ritually, without regard for its real meaning…as a figure of speech. Look, I asked you a question that you couldn’t answer.” The Butcher frowned. “See, you have to know what they mean to make sense out of what I just said. The best way to learn a language is by listening to it. So listen. When you”—she pointed to him—“said to me,” and she pointed to herself, “Knowing what ships to destroy, and ships are destroyed. Now to go down the Dragon’s Tongue, Jebel go down the Dragon’s Tongue, twice the fist—” she touched his left hand—“banged the chest.” She raised his hand to his chest. The skin was cool and smooth under her palm. “The fist was trying to tell something. And if you had used the word ‘I,’ you wouldn’t have had to use your fist. What you wanted to say was: ‘You knew what ships to destroy, and I destroyed the ships. You want to go down the Dragon’s Tongue; I will get Jebel down the Dragon’s Tongue.’ ” The Butcher frowned. “Yes, the fist to tell something.” “Don’t you see? Sometimes you want to say things, and you’re missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That’s how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn’t exist. And it’s something the brain needs to have exist, otherwise you wouldn’t have to beat your chest, or strike your fist on you...