Babel-17

by Samuel R. Delany

Those with more intelligence and sophistication discussed Rydra Wong’s poetry.

“Babel-17,” she said. “I haven’t solved it yet, General Forester.”

She shrugged. “This is an odd epoch. It takes heroes very suddenly, very young, then drops them just as quickly.”

“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 said something unprintable.

She nodded. “Mocky, up till a year ago, I didn’t even realize I was just saying other people’s ideas. I thought they were my own.” “Every young writer who’s worth anything goes through that. That’s when you learn your craft.”

“He was a brisk, ramrod efficient man,” she explained, “probably unmarried, with a military career, and all the insecurity that implies.

Civilians. God love 'em.

“He thought I didn’t understand. He thought nothing had been communicated. And I was angry. I was hurt. All the misunderstandings that tie the world up and keep people apart were quivering before me at once, waiting for me to untangle them, explain them, and I couldn’t. I didn’t know the words, the grammar, the syntax. And—” Something else was happening in her Oriental face, and he strained to catch it. “Yes?” “—Babel-17.”

“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, the universe.” He nodded. “And as I see into this language, I begin to see…too much.”

“Talk, talk, talk,” Lome derided. “Yeah, I remember you, Captain who talk. You go watch that son of a dog wrestle; then you know what sort of pilot he make.”

His nails were nub-gnawed on fingers like knotted lengths of white rope.

“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.”

The Officer shrugged. “He weighs two hundred and seventy pounds and he’s only five nine. Have you met a fat person yet who wasn’t mean as a rat underneath it all?”

Ships rose on white flares, blued through distance, and became bloody stars in the rusted sky.

The Transport work maneuvering through hyperstasis levels is an art. In a hundred years they may both be sciences. Fine. But today a person who learns the rules of art well is a little rarer than the person who learns the rules of science. Also, there’s a tradition involved. Transport people are used to dying and getting called back, working with dead men or live.

“Oh, yes,” said Calli, “but she can’t be a sweet, plump Irish girl with black hair and agate eyes and freckles that come out after four days of sun. She can’t have the slightest lisp that makes you tingle even when she reels off her calculations quicker and more accurate than a computer voice, yet still lisping, or makes you tingle when she holds your head in her lap and tells you about how much she needs to feel—”

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.

“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.”

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.

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

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

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

The discorporate crew deperceptualized.

“Discorporate?” The Baroness patted the lacquered intricacies of her high-coifed hair. “You mean dead? Oh, of course. Now I hadn’t thought of that at all. You see how cut off we are from one another in this world? I’ll have their places removed.”

The marble darted out, struck, struck, and struck. Five or six people applauded. Rydra was one.

Marbles! It IS a science fiction story.

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.

“Empire Star…?” Ron said, his eyes widening. “And the rest of the ‘Comet Jo’ books! You were tripled with Muels Aranlyde?”

Yes, we need that EMPIRE STAR eBook!

I feel like someone at a performance of Shakespeare shouting catcalls in pidgin English.”

Nominative, genitive, elative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, illative, instructive, abessive, adessive, inessive, essive, allative, translative, comitative.

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.

“He hooked your ship up from the center of the Cygnus-42 nova just before your stasis generators failed this side of the jump.”

“May I inquire what literary work you are engaged in now?”

A space pirate who appreciates poetry.

“Hear this: the strategy is Asylum. Asylum. Repeat a third time, Asylum. Inmates gather to face Caesar. Psychotics ready at the K-ward gate. Neurotics gather before the R-ward gate. Criminally insane prepare for discharge at the T-ward gate. All right, drop your strait jackets.”

“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.”

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.

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.

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 your palm. The brain wants it to exist. Let me teach it the word.”

“And that’s why you can’t go around killing people. At least you better do a hell of a lot of thinking before you do.

“Can’t you just lob a gross, uncivilized atom bomb at them?”

Across the table Mollya picked up the tall, red flask and looked at it questioningly. “Ketchup,” Dr. T’mwarba said. “Ohhh…!” Mollya breathed and returned it to the damask tablecloth.

You know, she was tripled with Muels Aranlyde, the guy who wrote Empire Star.

“The whole mechanism of guilt as a deterrent to right action is just as much a linguistic fault. If it bothers you, go back, get tried, be acquitted, then go on about your business. Let me be your business for awhile.” “Sure. But who says I get acquitted at this trial?” Rydra began to laugh. She stopped before him, took his hands, and laid her face against them, still laughing. “But I’ll be your defense! And even without Babel-17, you should know by now, I can pretty much talk my way out of anything.”