Babel-17

by Samuel R. Delany

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...