Babel-17

I

IT'S A PORT CITY. Here fumes mist 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 stellar centers 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 front 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 hoard 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 of these people have lived for two decades under the Invasion. They've starved during the embargoes, broken windows, looted, run screaming before fire-hoses, 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 during the last embargo holding her skeletal baby by one leg, or the three scrawny teen-age girls who had attacked him on the street with razors (—she had hissed through brown teeth, the bar of metal glistening toward his chest, "Come here. Beefsteak! Come get me Lunchmeat. . ." He had used karate—) or the blind man who had walked up the avenue screaming.

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 Holiday" 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, 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 street lights came on and his image glazed suddenly on the plate glass window of the bar. That's right, I'm not wearing my uniform now. 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 few 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 and turned away), stood up from the stool, smiled.

He walked forward, took her hand, the words Good evening, Miss Wong tumbling on his tongue till he swallowed them unspoken. And now she was about to speak. She wore copper lipstick, and the pupils of her eyes were like beaten disks of copper—"Babel-17," she said. "I haven't solved it yet, General Forester."

A knitted indigo dress, and her hair like fast water at night spilling over one shoulder; he said, "That doesn't really surprise me. Miss Wong."

Surprise, he thought. She puts her hand on the bar, she leans back on the stool, hip moving in knitted blue, and with each movement, I am amazed, surprised, bewildered. Can I be this off guard, or can she really be that—

"But I've gotten further than you people at Military have been able to." The gentle line of her mouth bowed with gentler laughter.

"From what I've been led to expect of you. Miss Wong, that doesn't surprise me either." Who is she? He thought. He had asked the question of the abstract population. He had asked it of his own reflected image, He asked it of her now, thinking. No one else matters, but I must know about her— That's important. I have to know.

“First of all. General," she was saying, "Babel-17 isn't a code."

His mind skidded back to the subject and arrived teetering. "Not a code? But I thought Cryptography had at least established—" He stopped, because he wasn't sure what Cryptography had established, and because he needed another moment to haul himself down from the ledges of her high cheekbones, to retreat from the caves of her eyes. Tightening the muscles of his face, he marshaled his thoughts to Babel-17. The Invasion: Babel-17 might be one key to ending this twenty-year scourge. "You mean we've just been trying to decipher a lot of nonsense?"

"It's not a code," she repeated. "It's a language." The General frowned. "Well, whatever you call it, code or language, we still have to figure out what it says. As long as we don't understand it, we're a hell of a way from where we should be." The exhaustion and pressure of the last months homed in his belly, a secret beast to strike the back of his tongue, harshening his words.

Her smile had left, and both hands were on the counter. He wanted to retract the harshness. She said, "You're not directly connected with the Cryptography Department." The voice was even, calming.

He shook his head.

"Then let me tell you this. Basically. General Forester, there are two types of codes. In the first, letters, or symbols that stand for letters, are shuffled and juggled according to a pattern. In the second, letters, words, or groups of words are replaced by other letters, symbols, or words. A code can be one type or the other, or a combination. But both have this in common: once you find the key, you just plug it in and out come logical sentences. 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."

"Do you mean that Babel-17 decodes into some other language?"

"Not at all. That's the first thing I checked. We can take a probability scan on various elements and see if they are congruent with other language patterns, even if these elements are in the wrong order. No. Babel-17 is a language itself which we do not understand."

"I think"—General Forester tried to smile—"What you're trying to tell me is that because it isn't a code, but rather an alien language, we might as well give up." If this were defeat, receiving it from her was almost relief.

But she shook her head. "I'm afraid that's not what I'm saying at all. Unknown languages have been deciphered without translations. Linear B and Hittite for example. But if I'm to get further with Babel-17, I'll have to know a great deal more."

The General raised his eyebrows. "What more do 'you need to know? We've given you all our samples. When we get more, we'll certainly—"

"General, I have to know everything you know about Babel-17 where you got it, when, under what circumstances, anything that might give me a clue to the subject matter."

"We're released all the information that we—"

"You gave me ten pages of double-spaced typewritten garble with the code name Babel-17 and asked me what it meant. With just that I can't tell you. With more, I might. It's that simple."

He thought: If it were that simple, if it were only that simple, we would never have called you in about it, Rydra Wong.

She said: "If it were that simple, if it were only that simple, you would never have called me in about it, General Forester."

He started, for one absurd moment convinced she had read his mind. But of course she would know that. Wouldn't she?

"General Forester, has your Cryptography Department discovered it's a language?"

"If they have, they haven't told me."

"I'm fairly sure they don't know. I've made a few structural inroads on the grammar. Have they done that?"

"No."

"General, although they know a hell of a lot about codes, they know nothing of the nature of language. That sort of idiotic specialization is one of the reasons I haven't worked with them for the past six years."

Who is she? he thought again. A security dossier had been handed him that morning, but he had passed it to his aide and merely noted, later, that it had been marked 'approved'. He heard himself say, "Perhaps if you could tell me a little about yourself. Miss Wong, I could speak more freely with you." Illogical, yet he'd spoken it with measured calm and surety. Was her expression quizzical?

"What do you want to know?"

"What I already know is only this: your name, and that some time ago you worked for Military Cryptography. I know that even though you left when very young, you had enough of a reputation so that, six years later, the people who remembered you said unanimously—after they had struggled with Babel-17 for a month—'Send it to Rydra Wong.' " He paused. "And you tell me you have gotten someplace with it. So they were right."

"Let's have drinks," she said.

The bartender drifted forward, drifted back, leaving two small glasses of smoky green. She sipped, watching him. Her eyes, he thought, slant up like astounded wings.

"I'm not from Earth," she said. "My father was a Communications engineer at StellarcenterX-11-B just beyond Uranus. My mother was a translator for the Court of Outer Worlds. Until I was seven I was the spoiled brat of the Stellarcenter. There weren't many children. We moved rockside to Uranus-XXVII in '52. By the time I was twelve, I knew seven Earth languages and could make myself understood in five extraterrestrial tongues. I pick up languages like most people pick up the lyrics to popular songs. I lost both parents during the second embargo."

"You were on Uranus during the embargo?"

"You know what happened?"

“I know the Outer Planets were hit a lot harder than the Inner."

"You don't know. But yes, they were." She drew a breath as memory surprised her. "One drink isn't enough to make me talk about it, though. When I came out of the hospital, there was a chance I may have had brain damage."

"Brain damage—?"

"Malnutrition you know about. Add neuro-sciatic plague."

"I know about plague, too."

"Anyway, I came to Earth to stay with an aunt and uncle here and receive neuro-therapy. Only I didn't need it. And I don't know whether it was psychological or physiological, but I came out of the whole business with total verbal recall. I'd been bordering on it all my life so it wasn't too odd. But I also had perfect pitch."

"Doesn't that usually go along with lightning calculation and eidetic memory? I can see how all of them would be of use to a cryptographer."

"I'm a fair mathematician, but no lightning calculator. I test high on visual conception and spatial relations—dream in Technicolor and all that—but the total recall is strictly verbal. I had already begun writing. During the summer I got a job translating with the government, and began to bone up on codes. In a little while I discovered that I had a certain—knack. I'm not a good cryptographer. I don't have the patience to work that hard on anything written down that I didn't write myself. Neurotic as hell; that's another reason I gave it up for poetry. But the ' knack' was sort of frightening. Somehow, when I had too much work to do, and— somewhere else I really wanted to be, and was scared my supervisor would start getting on my back, suddenly everything I knew about communication would come together in my head, and it was easier to read the thing in front of me and say what it said than to be that scared and tired and miserable."

She glanced at her drink.

"Eventually the knack got to where I could control it. By then I was nineteen and had a reputation as the little girl who could crack anything. I guess it was knowing something about language that did it, being more facile at recognizing patterns—like distinguishing grammatical order from random rearrangement by feel, which is what I did with Babel-17."

"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 greatness, love, and isolation." The three words jumped his sentence like vagabonds on a boxcar. She was before him, and was great; 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 as quickly."

He nodded, recalling half a dozen singers, actors, even writers in their late teens or early twenties who had been named genius for a year, two, three, only to disappear. Her reputation was only a phenomenon of three years duration.

"I'm part of my times," she said. "I'd like to transcend my times, but the times themselves have a good deal to do with who I am." Her hand retreated across the mahogany from her glass. 'You in Military, it must be much the same." She raised her head. "Have I given you what you want?"

He nodded. It was easier to lie with a gesture than a word.

"Good. Now, General Forester, what's Babel-17?"

He looked around for the bartender, but a glow brought his eyes back to her face—the glow was simply her smile, but from the corner of his eye he had actually mistaken it for a light. "Here," she said, pushing her second drink, untouched, to him. "I won't finish this."

He took it, sipped. "The Invasion, Miss Wong, . . . it's got to be involved with the Invasion."

She leaned on one arm, listening with narrowing eyes.

"It started with a series of accidents—well, at first they seemed like accidents. Now we're sure it's sabotage. They've occurred all over the Alliance regularly since December' 68. Some on warships, some in Space Navy Yards, usually involving the failure of some important equipment. Twice, explosions have caused the death of important officials. Several times these 'accidents' have happened in industrial plants producing essential war products."

"What connects all these 'accidents,' other than that they touched on the war? With our economy working this way, it would be difficult for any major industrial accident not to affect the war."

"The thing that connects them all, Miss Wong, is Babel-17."

He watched her finish her drink and set the glass precisely on the wet circle.

"Just before, during, and immediately after each accident, the area is flooded with radio exchanges back and forth from indefinite sources; most of them only have a carrying power of a couple of hundred yards. But there are occasional bursts through hyperstatic channels that blanket a few lightyears. We have transcribed the stuff during the last three 'accidents' and given it the working title Babel-17. Now. Does that tell you anything you can use?"

"Yes. There's a good chance you're receiving radio instructions for the sabotage back and forth between whatever is directing the 'accidents'—"

“—But we can't find a thing!" Exasperation struck. 'There's nothing but that blasted gobbledy-gook, piping away at double speed! Finally someone noticed certain repetitions in the pattern that suggested a code. Cryptography seemed to think it was a good lead but couldn't crack it for a month; so they called you."

As he talked, he watched her think. Now she said, “General Forester, I'd like the original monitors of these radio exchanges, plus a thorough report, second by second if it's available, of those accidents timed to the tapes."

"I don't know if—"

"If you don't have such a report, make one during the next accident' that occurs. If this radio garbage is a conversation, I have to be able to follow what's being talked about. You may not have noticed, but, in the copy Cryptography gave me, there was no distinction as to which voice was which. In short, what I'm working with now is a transcription of a highly technical exchange run together without punctuation, or even word breaks,"

"I can probably get you everything you want except the original recordings—"

"You have to. I must make my own transcription, carefully, and on my own equipment."

"We'll make a new one to your specifications." She shook her head. "I have to do it myself, or I can't promise a thing. There's the whole problem of phonemic and allophonic distinctions. Your people didn't even realize it was a language, so it didn't occur to them—"

Now he interrupted her. "What sort of distinctions?"

"You know the way some Orientals confuse the sounds of R and L when they speak a Western language? That's because R and L in many Eastern languages are allophones, that is, considered the same sound, written and even heard the same—just like the th at the beginning of they and at the beginning of theater."

"What's different about the sound of theater and fAey?"

"Say them again and listen. One's voiced and the other's unvoiced. They're as distinct as V and F; only they're allophones in English and you're used to hearing them as if they were the same phoneme."

"Oh."

"But you see the problem a 'foreigner' has transcribing a language he doesn't speak; he may come out with too many distinctions of sound, or not enough."

"How do you propose to do it?"

"By what I know about the sound systems of a lot of other languages and by feel."

"The 'knack' again?"

She smiled. "I suppose."

She waited for him to grant approval. What wouldn't he have granted her? For a moment he had been distracted by her voice through subtleties of sound. "Of course, Miss Wong," he said, "you're our expert. Come to Cryptography tomorrow and you can have access to whatever you need."

"Thank you. General Forester. I'll bring my official report in then."

He stood in the static beam of her smile. I must go now, he thought desperately. Oh, let me say something to her. "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 stayed 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—

Rydra stood up, her hands on the edge of the counter, looking at the mirror. The bartender came to remove the glasses at her fingertips. As he reached for them, he frowned.

"Miss Wong?"

Her face was fixed.

"Miss Wong, are you—"

Her knuckles were white and as the bartender watched, the whiteness crept along her hands till they looked like shaking wax.

"Is there something wrong. Miss Wong?"

She snapped her face toward him. "You noticed?" Her voice was a hoarse whisper, harsh, sarcastic, strained. She whirled from the bar and started toward the door, stopped once to cough, then hurried on.

II

"MOCKY, HELP ME"

"Rydra?" Dr. Markus T'mwarba pushed himself from the pillow in the darkness. Her face sprung in smoky light above the bed. "Where are you?"

"Downstairs, Mocky— Please, I've got to talk to you."

Her agitated features moved right, left, trying to avoid his look. He squinched his eyes against the glare, then opened them slowly. "Come on up."

Her face disappeared.

He waved his hand across the control board and soft light filled the sumptuous bedroom. He shoved back the gold quilt, stood on the fur rug, took a black silk robe from a gnarled bronze column, and as he swung it across his back the automatic contour wires wrapped the panels across his chest and straightened the shoulders. He brushed the induction bank in the rococo frame again, and aluminum flaps fell back on the sideboard. A steaming carafe and liquor decanters rolled forward.

Another gesture started bubble chairs inflating from the floor. As Dr. T'mwarba turned to the entrance cabinet, it creaked, mica wings slid out, and Rydra caught her breath.

"Coffee?" He pushed the carafe and the force-field caught it and carried it gently toward her. "What've you been doing?"

"Mocky, it . . . I . . . ?"

"Drink your coffee."

She poured a cup, lifted it halfway to her mouth. "No sedatives?"

"Creme de cacao or creme de cafe?" He held up two small glasses. "Unless you think alcohol is cheating, too. Oh, and there's some franks and beans left over from dinner. I had company."

She shook her head. "Just cacao." The tiny glass followed the coffee across the beam. "I've had a perfectly dreadful day."

He folded his hands.

"No work all afternoon, dinner guests who wanted to argue, and then deluged with calls from the moment they left. Just got to sleep ten minutes ago."

He smiled. "How was your evening?"

"Mocky, it . . . it was terrible."

Dr. T'mwarba sipped his liqueur. "Good. Otherwise I'd never forgive you for waking me up."

In spite of herself she smiled. "I can . . . can always c-c-count on you for s-sympathy, Mocky."

"You can count on me for good sense and cogent psychiatric advice. Sympathy? I'm sorry, not after eleven-thirty. Sit down. What happened?" A final sweep of his hand brought a chair up behind her. The edge tapped the back of her knees and she sat. "Now stop stuttering and talk to me. You got over that when you were fifteen." His voice had become very gentle and very sure.

She look another sip of coffee. "The code, you remember the code I was working on?"

Dr. T'mwarba lowered himself to a wide leather hammock and brushed back his white hair, still awry from sleep. "I remember you were asked to work on something for the government. You were rather scornful of the business."

"Yes. And, . . . well, it's not the code—which is a language, by the way—but just this evening, I—I talked to the General in charge. General Forester, and it happened . . . I mean again, it happened, and I knew!"

"Knew what?"

"Just like last time, knew what he was thinking!"

"You read his mind?"

"No. No, it was just like last time! I could tell, from what he was doing, what he was saying . . ."

"You've tried to explain this to me before, but I still don't understand, unless you're talking about some sort of telepathy."

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 any more: 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. When she finished there were tears starting on her lower lids. "What I want to say, what I want to express I just. . ."Again she shook her head. "I can't say it."

"If you want to keep growing as a poet, you'll have to."

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."

"And now I have things to say that are all my own. They're not what other people have said before, put in an original way. And they're not just violent contradictions of what other people have said, which amounts to the same thing. They're new, and I'm scared to death."

“Every young writer who becomes a mature writer has to go through that."

"It's easy to repeat; it's hard to speak, Mocky."

"Good, if you're learning that now. Why don't you start by telling me exactly how this . . . this business of your understanding works?"

She was silent for five, stretching to ten seconds. "All right. I'll try again. Just before I left the bar, I was standing there, looking in the mirror, and the bartender came up and asked me what was wrong."

"Could he sense you were upset?"

"He didn't 'sense' anything. He looked at my hands. They were clenched on the edge of the bar and they were turning white. He didn't have to be a genius to figure out something odd was going on in my head."

"Bartenders are pretty sensitive to that sort of signal. It's part of their job." He finished his coffee— "Your fingers were turning white? All right, what was this General saying to you, or not saying to you that he wanted to say?"

A muscle in her cheek jumped twice, and Dr. T'mwarba thought. Should I be able to interpret that more specifically than just her nervousness?

"He was a brisk, ramrod efficient man," she explained, "probably unmarried, with a military career, and all the insecurity that implies. He was in his fifties, and feeling odd about it. He walked into the bar where we were supposed to meet; his eyes narrowed, then opened, his hand was resting against his leg, and the fingers suddenly curled, then straightened, his pace slowed as he came in, but quickened by the time he was three steps toward me, and he shook my hand like he was afraid it would break."

T'mwarba's smile turned into laughter. "He fell in love with you!"

She nodded.

"But why in the world should that upset you? I think you should be flattered."

"Oh, I was!" She leaned forward. "I was flattered. And I could follow the whole thing through his head. Once, when he was trying to get his mind back on the code, Babel-17, I said exactly what he was thinking, just to let him know I was so close to him. I watched the thought go by that perhaps I was reading his mind—"

"Wait a minute. This is the part I don't understand. How did you know exactly what he was thinking?"

She raised her hand to her jaw. "He told me here. I said something about needing more information to crack the language. He didn't want to give it to me. I said I had to have it or I couldn't get any farther, it was that simple. He raised his head just a fraction—to avoid shaking it. If he had shaken his head, with a slight pursing of the lips, what do you think he would have been saying?"

Dr. T'mwarba shrugged. "That it wasn't as simple as you thought?"

"Yes. Now he made one gesture to avoid making that one. What does that mean?"

T'mwarba shook his head.

"He avoided the gesture because he connected its not being that simple with my being there. So he raised his head instead."

"Something like: If it were that simple, we wouldn't need you," T'mwarba suggested.

"Exactly. Now, while he raised his head, there was a slight pause halfway up. Don't you see what that adds?"

"No."

"If it were that simple—now the pause—if only it were that simple, we wouldn't have called you in about it." She turned her hands up in her lap. "And I said it back to him; then his jaw clenched—"

"In surprise?"

"—Yes. That's when he wondered for a second if I could read his mind."

Dr. T'mwarba shook his head. "It's too exact, Rydra. What you're describing is muscle-reading, which can be pretty accurate, especially if you know the logical area the person's thoughts are centered on. But it's still too exact. Get back to why you were upset by the business. Your modesty was offended by the attention of this . . . uncouth stellarman?"

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 autistic twelve year old girl had been sent to him for neuro-therapy, 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 she did."

“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?"

"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 fit 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 tongue."

"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 somebody first. That usually means you."

"Give."

"I'm going to solve this whole Babel-17 business myself."

T'mwarba leaned his head to the right.

"Because I have to find out who speaks this language, where it comes from, and what it's trying to say."

His head went left.

"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."

"It sounds very poetical."

She laughed. "You always say that to me to bring me back to earth."

"Which I don't have to do too often. Good poets tend to be practical and abhor mysticism."

"Something about trying to hit reality; you figure it out," she said. "Only, as poetry tries to touch something real, maybe this is poetical."

"All right. I still don't understand. But how do you propose to solve the Babel-17 mystery?"

"You really want to know?" Her hands fell to her knees. "I'm going to get a spaceship, get a crew together, and get to the scene of the next accident."

"That's right, you do have Interstellar Captain's papers. Can you afford it?"

"The government's going to subsidize it."

"Oh, fine— But why?"

"I'm familiar with a half-dozen languages of the Invaders. Babel-17 isn't one of them. It isn't a language of the Alliance. I want to find out who speaks this language—because I want to find out who, or what, in the Universe thinks that way. Do you think I can, Mocky?"

"Have another cup of coffee." He reached back over his shoulder and sailed the carafe across to her again. "That's a good question. There's a lot to consider. You're not the most stable person in the world— Managing a spaceship crew takes a special sort of psychology which—you have. Your papers, if I remember, were the result of that odd—eh, marriage of yours, a couple of years ago. But you only used an automatic crew. For a trip this length, won't you be managing Transport people?"

She nodded.

"Most of my dealings have been with Customs persons. You're more or less Customs."

"Both parents were Transport. I was Transport up till the time of the Embargo."

"That's true. Suppose I say, 'yes, I think you can'?"

"I'd say, 'thanks,' and leave tomorrow."

"Suppose I said I'd like a week to check over your psyche-indices with a microscope, while you took a vacation at my place, taught no classes, gave no public readings, avoided cocktail parties?"

"I'd say, 'thanks.' And leave tomorrow."

He grinned. "Then why are you bothering me?"

"Because—" She shrugged. "Because tomorrow I'm going to be busy as the devil . . . and I won't have time to say good-bye."

"Oh." The wryness of his grin relaxed into a smile. And he thought about the myna bird again.

Rydra, thin, thirteen, and gawky, had broken through the triple doors of the conservatory with the new thing called laughter she had just discovered how to make in her mouth. And he was parental proud that the near corpse, who had been given into his charge six months ago, was now a girl again, with boy-cropped hair and sulks and tantrums and questions and caresses for the two guinea pigs she had named Lump and Lumpkin. The air-conditioning pressed back the shrubbery to the glass wall and sun struck through the transparent roof. She had said, "What's that, Mocky?"

And he, smiling at her, sun-spotted in white shorts and superfluous halter, said, "It's a myna bird. It'll talk to you. Say hello."

The black eye was dead as a raisin with a pinhead of live light jammed in the corner. The feathers glistened and the needle beak lazed over a thick tongue. She cocked her head as the bird head cocked, and whispered, "Hello?"

Dr. T'mwarba had trained it for two weeks with fresh-dug earthworms to surprise her. The bird looked over its left shoulder and droned, “Hello, Rydra. It’s a fine day out and I'm happy."

Screaming.

As unexpected as that.

He'd thought she'd started to laugh. But her face was contorted, she began to beat at something with her arms, stagger backwards, fall. The scream rasped in near collapsed lungs, choked, rasped again. He ran to gather up her flailing, hysterical figure, while the drone of the bird's voice undercut her wailing: “It's a fine day out and I'm happy."

He'd seen acute anxiety attacks before. But this shook him. When she could talk about it later, she simply said—tensely, with white lips, "It frightened me!"

Which would have been it, had the damn bird not gotten loose three days later and flown up into the antenna net he and Rydra had put up together for her amateur radio stasis-crafter with which she-could listen to the hyperstatic communications of the transport ships in this arm of the galaxy. A wing and a leg got caught, and it began to beat against one of the hot lines so that you could see the sparks even in the sunlight. "We've got to get him out of there!" Rydra had cried. Her fingertips were over her mouth, but as she looked at the bird, he could see the color draining from under her tan. "I'll take care of it, honey," he said. "You just forget about him."

"If he hits that wire a couple of more times he'll be dead.

But he had already started inside for the ladder. When he came out, he stopped. She had shinned four-fifths up the guy wire on the leaning catalpa tree that shaded the corner of the house. Fifteen seconds later he was watching her reach out, draw back, reach out again toward the wild feathers. He knew damn well she wasn't afraid of the hot line, either; she'd strung it up herself. Sparks again. So she made up her mind and grabbed. A minute later she was coming across the yard, holding the rumpled bird at arm's length. Her face looked as if it had been blown across with powdered lime.

"Take it, Mocky," she said, with no voice behind her trembling lips, "before it says something and I start hollering again."

So now, thirteen years later, something else was speaking to her, and she said she was scared. He knew how scared she could be; he also knew with what bravery she could face down her fears.

He said, "Good-bye. I'm glad you woke me up. I'd be mad as a damp rooster if you hadn't come."

"The thanks is yours, Mocky," she said. "I'm still frightened,"

III

DANIL D. APPLEBY who seldom thought of himself by his name—he was a Customs Officer—stared at the order through wire-framed glasses and rubbed his hand across his crewcut red hair, "Well, it says you can, if you want to."

"And—?"

"And it is signed by General Forester."

“Then I expect you to cooperate.”

"But I have to approve—"

"Then you'll come along and approve on the spot. I don't have time to send the reports in and wait for processing."

"But there's no way—"

"Yes, there is. Come with me."

"But Miss Wong, I don't walk around Transport town at night."

"I enjoy it. Scared?"

"Not exactly. But—"

“I have to get a ship and a crew by the morning. And it's General Forester's signature. All right?"

"I suppose so."

"Then come on. I have to get my crew approved."

Insistent and protesting respectively, Rydra and the officer left the bronze and glass building.

They waited for the monorail nearly six minutes. When they came down, the streets were smaller, and a continuous whine of transport ships fell across the sky.

Warehouses and repair and supply shops, sandwiched rickety apartments and rooming houses. A larger street cut past, rumbling with traffic, busy loaders, stellar-men. They passed neon entertainments, restaurants of many worlds, bars and brothels. In the crush the Customs Officer pulled his shoulders in, walked more quickly to keep up with Rydra's long-legged stride.

"Where do you intend to find—?"

"My pilot? That's who I want to pick up first." She stopped on the corner, shoved her hands into the pockets of her leather pants, and looked around.

"Do you have someone in mind?"

"I'm thinking of several people. This way." They turned on a narrower street, more cluttered, more brightly lit.

"Where are we going? Do you know this section?"

But she laughed, slipped her arm through his, and, like a dancer leading without pressure, she turned him toward an iron stairway.

"In here?"

"Have you ever been to this place before?" she asked with an innocent eagerness that made him feel for a moment he was escorting her.

He shook his head.

Up from the basement cafe black burst—a man, ebony-skinned, with red and green jewels set into his chest, face, arms and thighs. Moist membranes, also Jeweled, fell from his arms, billowing on slender tines as he hurried up the steps.

Rydra caught his shoulder. "Hey, Lome!"

"Captain Wong!" The voice was high, the white teeth needle-filed. He whirled to her with extending sails. Pointed ears shifted forward. "What you here for?"

"Lome, Brass is wrestling tonight?"

"You want see him? Aye, Skipper, with the Silver Dragon, and it's an even match. Hey, I look for you on Deneb. I buy your book too. Can't read much, but I buy. And I no find you. Where you been a' six months?"

"Earthside, teaching at the University. "But I'm going out again."

"You ask Brass for pilot? You heading out Specelli way?"

"That's right."

Lome dropped his black arm around her shoulder and the sail cloaked her, shimmering. “You go out Caesar, you call Lome for pilot, ever you do. Know Caesar—" He screwed his face and shook his head. "Nobody know it better."

"When I do, I will. But now it's Specelli."

"Then you do good with Brass. Work with him before?"

"We got drunk together when we were both quarantined for a week on one of the Cygnet planetoids. He seemed to know what he was talking about."

"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."

"That's what I came to do," nodded Rydra. She turned to the Customs Officer, who shrank against the iron banister. God, he thought, she's going to introduce me. But she cocked her head with a half smile and turned back. "I'll see you again, Lome, when I get home."

"Yeah, yeah, you say that and say that twice. But I no in six months see you." He laughed. "But I like you, lady Captain. Take me to Caesar some day, I show you."

"When I go, you go, Lome."

A needle leer. "Go, go, you say. I got go now. Bye-bye, lady Captain,"—he bowed and touched his head in salute—"Captain Wong." And was gone.

"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 cosmeti surgery?"

"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."

"He's not a good pilot? What was all that about the Caesar nebula?"

"I'm sure he knows it. But he's at least a hundred and twenty years old. After eighty, your reflexes start to go, and that's the end of a pilot's career. He just shuttle-bums from port city to port city, knows everything that happens to everybody, stays good for gossip and advice."

They entered the cafe on a ramp that swerved above me heads of the customers drinking at bar and table thirty feet below. Above and to the side of them, a fifty-foot sphere hovered like smoke, under spotlights. Rydra looked from the globe to the Customs Officer. "They haven't started the games yet."

"Is this where they hold those fights?"

"That's right."

"But that's supposed to be illegal!"

"Never passed the bill. After they debated, it got shelved."

"Oh."

As they descended among the jovial transport workers, the Officer blinked. Most were ordinary men and women, but the results of cosmetic surgery were numerous enough to keep his eyes leaping. "I've never been in a place like this before!" he whispered. Amphibians or reptilian creatures argued and laughed with griffins and metallic-skinned sphinxes.

"Leave your clothing here?" smiled the check girl. Her naked skin was candy green, her immense coil piled like pink cotton. Her breasts, navel, and lips flashed.

“I don't believe so," the Customs Officer said quickly.

"At least take your shoes and shirt off," Rydra said, slipping off her blouse. "People will think you're strange." She bent, rose and handed her sandals over the counter. She had begun to unbuckle her waist cinch when she caught his desperate look, smiled, and fastened the buckle again.

Carefully he removed jacket, vest, shirt, and undershirt. He was about to untie his shoes when someone grabbed his arm. "Hey, Customs!"

He stood up before a huge, naked man with a frown on his pocked face like a burst in rotten rind. His only ornaments were mechanical beetle lights that swarmed in patterns over his chest, shoulders, legs and arms.

"Eh, pardon me?"

"What you doing here. Customs?"

"Sir, I am not bothering you."

"And I'm not bothering you. Have a drink, Customs. I'm being friendly."

"Thank you very much, but I'd rather—"

"I'm being friendly. You're not. If you're not gonna be friendly. Customs, I'm not gonna be friendly either."

"Well, I'm with some—" He looked helplessly at Rydra.

“Come on. Then you both have a drink. On me. Real friendly, damn it." His other hand fell toward Rydra's shoulder, but she caught his wrist. The fingers opened from the many-scaled stellarimeter grafted onto his palm. "Navigator?"

He nodded, and she let the hand go, which landed.

"Why are you so 'friendly' tonight?"

The intoxicated man shook his head. His hair was knotted in a stubby black braid over his left ear. "I'm just friendly with Customs here. I like you."

"Thanks. Buy us that drink and I'll buy you one back."

As he nodded heavily, his green eyes narrowed. He reached between her breasts and fingered up the gold disk that hung from the chain around her neck. "Captain Wong?"

She nodded.

"Better not mess with you, then." He laughed. "Come on. Captain, and I'll buy you and Customs here something to make you happy." They pushed their way to the bar.

What was green and came in small glasses at the more respectable establishments here was served in mugs.

"Who you betting on in the Dragon-Brass skirmish, and if you say the Dragon, I'll throw this in your face. Joking, of course. Captain."

"I'm not betting," Rydra said. "I'm hiring. You know Brass?"

"Was a navigator on his last trip. Got in a week ago."

"You're friendly for the same reason he's wrestling?"

"You might say that."

The Customs Officer scratched his collarbone and looked puzzled.

"Last trip Brass made went bust," Rydra explained to him. "The crew is out of work. Brass is on exhibit tonight." She turned again to the Navigator. "Will there be many captains bidding for him?"

He put his tongue just under his upper lip, squinted one eye and dropped his head. He shrugged.

"I'm the only one you've run into?"

A nod, a large swallow of liquor.

"What's your name?"

"Calli, Navigator-Two."

"Where are your One and Three?"

"Three's over there somewhere getting drunk. One was a sweet girl named Cathy O'Higgins— She's dead." He finished the drink and reached over for another one.

"My treat," Rydra said. "Why's she dead?"

"Ran into Invaders. Only people who ain't dead, Brass, me and Three, and our Eye. Lost the whole platoon, our Slug. Damn good Slug too. Captain, that was a bad trip. The Eye, he cracked up without the Ear and Nose. They'd been discorporate for ten years together. Ron, Cathy and me, we'd only been tripled for a couple of months. But even so . . ."He shook his head. "It's bad."

"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 gonna 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 the 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 cosmetic surgery 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 Navigators looked at each other.

Calli turned to Rydra and rubbed the side of his nose with his thumb. "You know the thing about a triple like us—"

Rydra's left hand caught her right. "Like this, you have to be. My choice is subject to your approval, of course."

"Well, it's pretty difficult for someone else—"

"It's impossible. But it's your choice. I just make suggestions. But my suggestions are damn good ones. What do you say?"

Calli's thumb moved from his nose to his earlobe. He shrugged. "You can't make an offer much better than that."

Rydra looked at Ron.

The kid put one foot up on the stool, hugged his knee, and peered across his patella. "I say, let's see who you suggest."

She nodded. "Fair."

"You know, jobs for broken triples aren't all that common." Calli put his hand on Ron's shoulder.

"Yeah, but—"

Rydra looked up. "Let's watch the wrestling."

Along the counter people raised their heads. At the tables, patrons released the catch in their chair arms so that the backs swung to half recline.

Calli's mug clinked on the counter, and Ron raised both feet to the stool and leaned back against the bar.

"What are they looking at?" the Customs Officer asked. "Where's everybody—" Rydra put her hand on the back of his neck and did something so that he laughed and swung his head up. Then he sucked a great breath and let it out slowly.

The smoky globe, hung in the vault, was shot with colored light. The room had gone dim. Thousands of watts of floodlights struck the plastic surface and gleamed on the faces below as smoke in the bright sphere faded.

"What's going to happen?" the Customs Officer asked. "Is that where they wrestle . . . ?"

Rydra brushed her hand over his mouth and he nearly swallowed his tongue: but was quiet.

And the Silver Dragon came, wings working in the smoke, silver feathers like clashed blades, scales on the grand haunches shaking; she rippled her ten-foot body and squirmed in the antigravity field, green lips leering, silver lids batting over green orbs,. "It's a woman!" breathed the Customs Officer.

An appreciative tattoo of finger snapping scattered through the audience.

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.

The globe flared red. The two pilots turned to one another across the sphere's diameter. Voices quieted. The Customs Officer glanced from the ceiling to the people around him. Every other face was up. The Navigator, Three, was hunched in a fetal knot on the barstool. Copper shifting; Rydra too dropped her eyes to glance at the lean bunched arms and striated thighs of the rose-shouldered boy.

Above, the opponents flexed and stretched, drifting. A sudden movement from the Dragon, and Brass drew back, then launched from the wall.

The Customs Officer grabbed something.

The two forms struck, grappled, spun against a wall and ricocheted. People began to stamp, arm over arm, leg wrapped around leg, till Brass whirled loose from her and was hurled to the upper wall of the arena. Shaking his head, he righted. Below, alert, the Dragon twisted and writhed, anticipation jerking her wings. Brass leapt from the ceiling, reversed suddenly, and caught the Dragon with his hind feet. She staggered back, flailing. Saber teeth came together and missed—

"What are they trying to do?" the Customs Officer whispered. "How can you tell who's winning?" He looked down again: what he'd grabbed was Calli's shoulder.

"When one can throw the other against the wall and only touch the far wall himself with one limb on the ricochet," Calli explained, not looking down, "that's a fall."

The Silver Dragon snapped her body like bent metal released, and Brass shot away and spread-eagled against the globe. But as she floated back to take the shock on one hind leg, she lost her balance and the second leg touched, too.

The anticipatory breath loosed in the audience. Encouraging snapping; Brass recovered, leaped, pushed her to the wall, but his rebound was too sharp and he, too, staggered on three limbs.

A twist in the center again. The Dragon snarled, stretched, shook her scales. Brass glowered, peering with eyes like gold coins hooded, spun back quaking, then forward.

Silver whirled beneath his shoulder blow, hit the globe. She looked for the world as if she were trying to climb the side. Brass rebounded lightly, caught himself on one paw, then pushed away.

The globe flashed green, and Calli pounded the bar. "Look at him show that tinsel bitch!"

Grappling limbs braided one another, and claw caught claw till the stifled arms shook, broke apart. Two more falls that went to neither side; then the Silver Dragon came head first into Brass' chest, knocked him back, and recovered on tail alone. Below the crowd stamped.

"That's a foul!" Calli exclaimed, shaking the Customs Officer away. "Damn it, that's a foul!" But the globe flashed green again. Officially the second fall was hers.

Warily now they swam in the sphere. Twice the Dragon feinted, and Brass jerked aside his claws or sucked in his belly to avoid her.

"Why don't she lay off him?" Calli demanded of the sky. “She's nagging him to death. Grapple and fight!"

As if in answer. Brass sprang, again swiping her shoulder; what would have been a perfect fall got messed up because the Dragon caught his arm and he swerved off, smashing clumsily against the plastic surface.

"She can't do that!" This time it was the Customs Officer. He grabbed Calli again. "Can she do that? I don't think they should allow—“ And he bit his tongue because Brass swung back, hauled her from the wall, flipped her between his legs, and as she scrambled off the plastic, he bounced on his forearm and hovered centrally, flexing for the crowd.

"That's it!" cried Calli. "Two out of three!"

The globe flashed green again. Snapping broke into applause. "Did he win?" demanded the Customs Officer. "Did he win?"

"Listen! Of course he won! Hey, let's go see him. Come on. Captain!"

Rydra had already started through the crowd. Ron sprang behind her, and Calli, dragging the Customs Officer, came after— A flight of black tile steps took them into a room with couches where a few groups of men and women stood around Condor, a great gold and crimson creature, who was being made ready to fight Ebony who waited alone in the corner. The arena exit opened and Brass came in sweating.

"Hey," Calli called. "Hey, that was great, boy. And the Captain here wants to talk to you."

Brass stretched, then dropped to all fours, a low rumble in his chest. He shook his mane, then his gold eyes widened in recognition. "Ca'tain Wong!" The mouth, distended through cosmetisurgically implanted fangs, could not deal with a plosive labial unless it was voiced— "How you'd like me tonight?"

"Well enough to want you to pilot me through the Specelli." She roughed a tuft of yellow behind his ear. "You said sometime ago you'd like to show me what you could do."

"Yeah," Brass nodded. "I just think I'm dreaming." He pulled away his loin rag and swabbed his neck and arms with the bunched cloth, then caught the Customs Officer's amazed expression. "Just cosmetisurgery." He kept on swabbing.

"Hand him your psyche-rating," Rydra said, "and he'll approve you."

"That means we leave tomorrow. Ca'tain?"

"At dawn."

From his belt pouch Brass drew a thin metal card. "Here you go. Customs."

The Customs Officer scanned the runic marking. On a metal tracing plate from his back pocket, he noted the shift in stability index, but decided to integrate for the exact summation later on. Practice told him it was welt above acceptable. "Miss Wong, I mean Captain Wong, what about their cards?" He turned to Calli and Ron.

Ron reached behind his neck and rubbed his scapula. "You don't worry about us till you get a Navigator-One." The hard, adolescent face held an engaging belligerence.

"We'll check them later," Rydra said— "We've got more people to find first."

"You're looking for a full crew?" asked Brass.

Rydra nodded. "What about the Eye that came back with you?"

Brass shook his head. "Lost his Ear and Nose, They were a real close tri'le, Ca'tain. He hung around maybe six hours before he went back to the Morgue."

"I see. Can you recommend anyone?"

"No one in 'articular. Just hang around the Discor'orate Sector and see what turns u'."

"If you want a crew by morning, we better start now," said Calli.

"Let's go," said Rydra.

As they walked to the ramp's foot, the Customs Officer asked, "The Discorporate Sector?"

"What about it?" Rydra was at the rear of the group.

"That's so—well, I don't like the idea."

Rydra laughed. "Because of the dead men? They won't hurt you."

"And I know that's illegal, for bodily persons to be in the Discorporate Sector."

"In certain parts," Rydra corrected, and the other men laughed now. "We'll stay out of the illegal sections—if we can."

"Would you like your clothes back?" the check-girl asked.

People had been stopping to congratulate Brass, pounding at his hip with appreciative fists and snapping their fingers. Now he swung his contour cape over his head. It fell to his shoulders, clasped his neck, draped under his arms and around his thick hams. Brass waved to the crowd and started up the ramp.

"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."

"I'd heard about it, of course. But this was the first time I've seen it— It was . . . exciting."

"Yes," Rydra said.

As they reached the ramp's head, lights again pierced the globe. Ebony and Condor circled in the fighting sphere.

On the sidewalk Brass dropped back, loping on all fours, to Rydra's side. "What about a Slug and a 'latoon?"

"I'd like to get a one-trip platoon if I can."

"Why so green?"

"I want to train them my way. The older groups tend to be too set."

"A one-tri' grou' can be a hell of a 'roblem to disci'line. And inefficient as 'iss, so I've heard. Never been with one myself."

“As long as there're no out and out nuts, I don't care. Besides, if I want one now, I can be surer of getting one by morning if I put my order in at Navy."

Brass nodded. "Your request in yet?"

“I wanted to check with my pilot first and see if you had any preferences."

They were passing a street phone on the corner lamppost. Rydra ducked beneath the plastic hood. A minute later she was saying, "—a platoon for a run toward Specelli scheduled at dawn tomorrow. I know that it's short notice, but I don't need a particularly seasoned group. Even a one trip will do." She looked from under the hood and winked at them. "Fine. I'll call later to get their psyche-indices for customs approval. Yes, I have an Officer with me. Thank you."

She came from under the hood. "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 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 fires glimmered through industrial smog. Three figures formed: women, 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 and occasionally passed one of the less fantastic on the street. But this . . ."

"There's some jobs"—Calli's voice was as heavy with alcohol as his shoulders with muscle—"Some jobs on a Transport Ship you just can't give to a live human being."

"I know, I know," said the Customs Officer. "So you use dead ones."

"That's right." Calli nodded. "Like the Eye, Ear, and Nose, A live human scanning all that goes on in those hyperstasis frequencies would—well, die first, and go crazy second."

"I do know the theory," the Customs Officer stated sharply.

Calli suddenly cupped the Officer's cheek in 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 cafe. "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. Calli leaned on a girder. Something else was working in the Officer's mouth.

"You have something to say," Rydra said.

Surprise that she knew prized his lips. He looked from Calli to Ron, back. "I'm sorry for you."

Calli's brows raised, then returned, his expression settling. "I'm sorry for you too."

Brass reared. "There's a transfer conclave about a quarter of a mile down in the medium energy states. That would attract the sort of Eye, Ear and Nose you want for Specelli." He grinned at the Officer through his fangs. "That's one of your illegal sections. The hallucination count goes way u', and some cor'orate egos can't handle it. But most sane 'eo'le don't have any 'roblem."

"If it's illegal, I'd just as soon wait right here," the Customs Officer said. "You can just come back and pick me up. I'll approve their indices then."

Rydra nodded. Calli threw one arm around the waist of the ten-foot pilot, the other around Ron's shoulder. "Come on. Captain, if you want to get your crew by morning."

"If we don't find what we want in an hour, we'll be back anyway," she said.

The Customs Officer watched them move away between the slim towers—

IV

—RECALL FROM broken banks the 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 as 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, as though, as if. He stood, losing her laughter, replaced by whirled bewilderment in the tides of his consciousness fading—

V

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 cafe!"

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 pain. The rifled wallet seemed trivial. Tears banked his eyes. "But she was—" and 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 with some 'retty shady methods, too. I'd be embarrassed to tell you how many times that's ha'ened to me."

"She left you enough to get home with," Rydra said. "I'll reimburse you."

"No, I . . ."

"Come on. Captain. He paid for it, and he got his money's worth, ay Customs?"

Choking on the embarrassment, he nodded.

"Then check these ratings," Rydra said. "We still have a Slug to pick up, and a Navigator-One."

At a public phone, Rydra called back to Navy. Yes, a platoon had turned up. A Slug had been recommended along with them. "Fine," Rydra said, and handed the phone to the officer. He took the psyche-indices from the clerk and incorporated them for final integration with the Eye, Ear, and Nose cards that Rydra had given him. The Slug looked particularly favorable. "Seems to be a talented coordinator," he ventured.

"Can't have too good a Slug. Es'ecially with a new 'latoon." Brass shook his mane. "He's got to keep those kids in line."

"This one should do it. Highest compatibility index I've seen in a long while."

"What's the hostility on him?" asked Calli. "Compatibility, hell! Can he give your butt a good kick when you need it?"

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?"

"There you go!" Calli laughed.

"Where do we go to fix the wound?" Brass asked Rydra.

She raised her brows questioningly.

"To get a first navigator," he explained.

"To the Morgue."

Ron frowned. Calli looked puzzled. The flashing bugs collared his neck, then spilled his chest again, scattering. "You know our first navigator's got to be a girl who will—"

"She will be," Rydra said.

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 with blue signal lights. Ships rose with a white flare, blued through distance, became bloody stars in the rusted air.

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 reference 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 in the dark. 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.

"Occasionally it's been known to happen," responded the Officer dryly.

"More rarely than with Transport," Rydra said.

“As of yet, the Customs work involved in getting ships from star to star is a science. The transport work maneuvering through hyperstasis levels is still 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. This is still a little hard for Customs to take. Over here to the Suicides."

They left the main lobby for the labeled corridor that sloped up through the storage chamber. 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 afterwards, 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."

Besides them, a twelve-foot filing crystal glowed like pin quartz. "Ron," said Rydra. "No, Ron and Calli, too."

The Navigators stepped up, puzzled.

"You know some first navigator who suicided recently that you think we might—"

Rydra shook her head. She passed her hand before the filing crystal. In the concaved screen at the base, words flashed. She stilled her fingers. "Navigator-Two. . . ." She turned her hand. "Navigator-One. . . ." She paused and ran her hand in a different direction.". . . male, male, male, female. Now, you talk to me, Calli, Ron."

"Huh? About what?"

"About yourselves, about what you want." Rydra's eyes moved back and forth between the screen and the man and boy beside her.

"Well, huh . . . ?" Calli scratched his head. "Pretty," said Ron. "I want her to be pretty." He leaned forward, an intense light in his blue eyes.

"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—"

"Calli!" from Ron. And the big man stopped with his fist against his stomach, breathing hard.

Rydra watched, her hand drifting through centimeters over the crystal's face. The names on the screen flashed back and forth.

"But pretty," Ron repeated. "And likes sports, to wrestle, I think, when we're planet side. Cathy wasn't very athletic. I always thought it would have been better, for me, if she was, see. I can talk better to people I can wrestle with. Serious though, I mean about working. And quick like Cathy could think. Only . . ."

Rydra's hand drifted down, then made a jerky motion to the left.

"Only," said Calli, his hand falling from his belly, his breath more easy, “she's got to be a whole person, a new person, not somebody who is half what we remember about somebody else."

"Yes," said Ron. "I mean if she's a good navigator, and she loves us."

". . . could love us," said Calli.

"If she was all you wanted and herself besides," asked Rydra, her hand shaking between two names on the screen, "could you love her?"

The hesitation, and nod slow from the big man, quick from the boy.

Rydra's hand came down on the crystal face, and the name glowed on the screen. “Mollya Twa, Navigator-One." Her coordinate numbers followed. Rydra dialed them at the desk.

Seventy-five feet overhead something glittered. One among hundreds of thousands of glass coffins was tracking from the wall above them on an inductor beam.

The recall-stage jutted up a pattern of lugs, the tips glowing. The coffin dropped, its contents obscured by streaks and hexagonal bursts of frost inside the glass. The lugs caught the tramplateon the coffin's base. It rocked a moment, settled, clicked.

The frost melted of a sudden, and the inside surface fogged, then ran with droplets. They stepped forward to see.

Dark band on dark. A movement beneath the glaring glass; then the glass parted, melting back from her deep, warm skin and beating, terrified eyes.

"It's all right," Calli said, touching her shoulder. She raised her head to look at his hand, then dropped back to the pillow. Ron crowded the Navigator-Two.

"Hello?"

"Eh . . . Miss Twa?" Calli said. "You're alive now. Will you love us?"

"Ninyini nani?" Her face was puzzled. "Nikowapi hapa?"

Ron looked up amazed. "I don't think she speaks English."

“Yes. I know," Rydra grinned. "But other than that she's perfect. This way you'll have time to get to know each other before you can say something really foolish. She likes to wrestle, Ron."

Ron looked at the young woman in the case. Her graphite colored hair was boy short, her full lips purple with chill. "You wrestle?"

"Ninyi ni nani?" she asked again.

Calli lifted his hand from her shoulder and stepped back. Ron scratched his head and frowned.

"Well?" said Rydra.

Calli shrugged. "Well, we don't know."

"Navigation Instruments are standard gear. There won't be any trouble communicating there."

"She is pretty," Ron said. "You are pretty. Don't be frightened. You're alive now."

"Ninaogapa!" she seized Calli's hand. "Jee, ni usiku au mchana?" Her eyes were wide.

"Please don't be frightened!" Ron took the wrist of the hand that had seized Calli's.

"Sielewi lugha yenu." She shook her head, a gesture containing no negation, only bewilderment. "Sikujuweni ninyi nani. Ninaogapa."

And with bereavement-born urgency, both Ron and Calli nodded in affirmative reassurance. Rydra stepped between them and spoke. After a long silence, the woman nodded slowly. "She says she'll go with you. She lost two-thirds of her triple seven years ago, also killed through the Invasion. That's why she came to the Morgue and killed herself. She says she will go with you. Will you take her?"

"She's still afraid," Ron said. "Please don't be. I won't hurt you. Calli won't hurt."

"If she'll come with us," Calli said, "we'll take her."

The Customs Officer coughed. "Where do I get her psyche rating?"

"Right on the screen under the filing crystal. That's how they're arranged within the larger categories."

The Officer walked back to the crystal. "Well"—He took out his pad and began to record the indices. "It's taken a while, but you've got just about everybody."

"Integrate," Rydra said.

He did, and looked up, surprised in spite of himself. "Captain Wong, I think you've got your crew!"

VI

VII

LIGHT BUT NO SHADOW. The General stood on the saucer-sled, looking at the black ship, the paling sky. At the base he stepped from the gliding two-foot diameter disk, climbed onto the lift, and rose a hundred feet toward the lock. She wasn't in the captain's cabin. He ran into a fat bearded man who directed him up the corridor to the freight lock. He climbed to the top of the ladder and took hold of his breath because it was about to run away.

She dropped her feet from the wall, sat up in the canvas chair and smiled. "General Forester, I thought I might see you this morning." She folded a piece of message tissue and sealed the edge.

“I wanted to see you . . ." and his breath was gone and had to be caught once more, "before you left."

"I wanted to see you, too."

"You told me if I gave you license to conduct this expedition, you would inform me where you—"

"My report, which you should find satisfactory, was mailed last night and is on your desk at Administrative Alliance Headquarters—or will be in an hour."

"Oh. I see,"

She smiled. "You'll have to go shortly. We take off in a few minutes."

"Yes. Actually, I'm taking off the Administrative Alliance Headquarters myself this morning, so I was here at the field, and I'd already gotten a synopsis of your report by stellarphone a few minutes ago, and I just wanted to say—" and he said nothing.

"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 flaring suddenly as light blistered the east.