Babel-17

by Samuel R. Delany

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. ...