Babel-17

I

THE RETRANSCRIBED MATERIAL passed on the sorting screen. By the computer console laid the four pages of definitions she had amassed and a cuaderno full of grammatical speculations. Chewing her lower lip, she ran through the frequency tabulation of depressed diphthongs. On the wall she had tacked three charts labeled:

Possible Phonemic Structure . . .

Probable Phonetic Structure . . .

Siotic, Semantic, and Syntactic Ambiguities . . .

The last contained the problems to be solved. The questions, formulated and answered, were transferred as certainties of the first two. I—

"Captain?"

She turned on the bubble seat.

Hanging from the entrance hatch by his knees was Diavalo.

"Yes?"

"What you want for dinner?" The little cook was a boy of seventeen. Two cosmetic surgical horns jutted from shocked, albino hair. He was scratching one ear with the tip of his tail.

Rydra shrugged. "No preferences. Check around with the rest of the platoon."

"Those guys'll eat liquefied organic waste if I give it to them. No imagination. Captain. What about pheasant under glass, or maybe rock Cornish game hen?"

"You're in the mood for poultry?"

"Well—" He released the bar with one knee and kicked the wall so he swung back and forth. “I could go for something birdy."

"If nobody objects, try coq au vin, baked Idahos, and broiled beefsteak tomatoes."

"Now you're cookin'!"

"Strawberry shortcake for dessert?"

Diavalo snapped his fingers and swung up toward the hatch. Rydra laughed and turned back to the console.

"Reisling on the coq, May wine with the meal.'' The pink-eyed face was gone.

Rydra had discovered the third example of what might have been syncope when the bubble chair sagged back. The cuardemo slammed against the ceiling. She would have, too, had she not grabbed the edge of the desk. Her shoulders wrenched. Behind her the skin of the bubble chair split and showered suspended silicon.

The cabin stilled and she turned to see Diavalo spin through the hatch and crack his hip as he grabbed at the transparent wall.

Jerk.

She slipped on the wet, deflated skin of the bubble chair. The Slug's face jounced on the intercom. "Captain!"

"What the hell . . ." she demanded.

The blinker from Drive Maintenance was flashing. Something jarred the ship again.

"Are we still breathing?"

"Just a . . ." The Slug's face, heavy and rimmed with a thin black beard, got an unpleasant expression. "Yes, Air; all right. Drive Maintenance has the problem."

"If those damn kids have . . ." She clicked them on.

Flop, the Maintenance Foreman, said, "Jesus, Captain, something blew."

"What?"

"I don't know." Flop's face appeared over his shoulder.

"A and B shifters are all right. C's glittering like a Fourth of July sparkler. Where the hell are we, anyway?"

“On the first hour shift between Earth and Luna. We haven't even got free of Stellarcenter-9. Navigation?" Another click.

Mollya's dark face popped up.

"Wie gehts?" demanded Rydra.

The first Navigator reeled off their probability curve and located them between two vague logarithmic spirals—"We're orbiting Earth so far," Ron's voice cut over. "Something knocked us way off course. We don't have any drive power and we're just drifting."

"How high up and how fast?"

"Calli's trying to find out now."

"I'm going to take a look around outside." She called down to the Sensory Detail. "Nose, that does it smell like out there?"

"It stinks. Nothing in this range. We've hit soup."

"Can you hear anything. Ear?"

"Not a peep. Captain. All the stasis currents in this area are at a standstill. We're too near a large gravitational mass. There's a faint ethric undertow about fifty spectres K-ward. But I don't think it will take us anywhere except around in a circle. We're riding on momentum from the last stiff wind from Earth's mango sphere."

"What's it look like. Eyes?"

"Inside of a coal scuttle. Whatever happened to us, we picked a dead spot to have it happen in. In my range that undertow is a little stronger and might move us into a good tide."

Brass cut in. "But I'd like to know where it's going before I went jumping off into it. That means I gotta know where we are, first."

"Navigation?"

Silence for a moment. Then the three faces appeared. Calli said, "We don't know. Captain."

The gravity field had stabilized a few degrees off. The silicon suspension collected in one corner. Little Diavalo shook his head and blinked. Through the contortion of pain on his face he whispered, "What happened, Captain?"

“Damned if I know, "Rydra said. "But I'm going to find out."

Dinner was eaten silently. The platoon, all kids under twenty-one, made as little noise as possible. At the officers' table the Navigators sat across from the apparitional figures of the discorporate Sensory Observers, The hefty Slug at the table's head poured wine for the silent crew. Rydra dined with Brass.

"I don't know." He shook his maned head, turning his glass in gleaming claws. "It was smooth sailing with nothing in the way. Whatever happened, happened inside the ship."

Diavalo, hip in a pressure bandage, dourfully brought in the shortcake, served Rydra and Brass, then retired to his seat at the platoon table.

"So," Rydra said, "we're orbiting Earth with all our instruments knocked out and can't even tell where we are."

"The hyperstasis instruments are good," he reminded her. "We just don't know where we are on this side of the jum'."

"And we can't jump if we don't know where we're jumping from." She looked over the dining room. "Do you think they're expecting to get out of this. Brass?"

"They're ho'ing you can get them out, Ca'tain."

She touched the rim of her glass to her lower lip.

“If somebody doesn't, we'll sit here eating Diavalo's good food for six months, then suffocate. We can't even get a signal out until after we lea’ for hy’erstasis with the regular communicator shorted. I asked the Navigators to see if they could im’rovise something, but no go. They just had time to see that we were launched in a great circle."

"We should have windows," Rydra said, "At least we could look out at the stars and time our orbit. It can't be more than a couple of hours."

Brass nodded. "Shows you what modern conveniences mean. A 'orthote and an old-fashioned sextant could get us right, but we're electronicized to the gills, and here we sit, with a neatly insoluble 'roblem."

"Circling—"Rydra put down her wine.

"What is it?"

"Der Kreis," said Rydra. She frowned.

"What's that?" asked Brass.

"Ratas, orbis, Ucerchio." She put her palms flat on the tabletop and pressed. "Circles," she said. "Circles in different languages!"

Brass' confusion was terrifying through his fangs. The glinting fleece above his eyes bristled.

"Sphere," she said, "il gtobo, gumlas." She stood up. "Kule, kuglet, kring!"

"Does it matter what language it's in? A circle is a cir—"

But she was laughing, running from the dining room.

In her cabin she grabbed up her translation. Her eyes fled down the pages. She banged the button for the Navigators. Ron, wiping whipped-cream from his mouth, said, "Yes, Captain? What do you want?"

"A watch," said Rydra, "and a—bag of marbles!"

"Huh?" asked Calli.

"You can finish your shortcake later. Meet me in G-center right now."

"Mar-bles?" articulated Mollya wonderingly. "Marbles?"

"One of the kids in the platoon must have brought along a bag of marbles. Get it and meet me in G-center."

She jumped over the ruined skin of the bubble seat and leapt up the hatchway, turned off at the radial shaft seven, and launched down the cylindrical corridor toward the hollow spherical chamber of G-center. The calculated center of gravity of the ship, it was a chamber thirty feet in diameter in constant free fall where certain gravity-sensitive instruments took their readings. A moment later the three Navigators appeared through the diametric entrance—Ron held up a mesh bag of glass balls. "Lizzy asks you to try and get these back to her by tomorrow afternoon because she's been challenged by the kids in Drive and she wants to keep her championship."

"If this works she can probably have them back tonight."

"Work?" Mollya wanted to know. "Idea you?"

"I do. Only it's not really my idea."

"Whose is it, and what is it?" Ron asked.

"I suppose it belongs to somebody who speaks another language—What we've got to do is arrange the marbles around the wall of the room in a perfect sphere, and then sit back with the clock and keep tabs on the second hand."

"What for?" asked Calli.

"To see where they go and how long it takes them to get there."

"I don't get it," said Ron.

"Our orbit tends toward a great circle about the Earth, right? That means everything in the ship is also tending to orbit in a great circle, and, if left free of influence, will automatically seek out such a path."

"Right. So what?"

"Help me get these marbles in place," Rydra said. "These things have iron cores. Magnetize the walls, will you, to hold them in place, so they can all be released at once." Ron, confused, went to power the metal walls of the spherical chamber. "You still don't see? You're mathematicians, tell me about great circles."

Calli took a handful of marbles and started to space them—tiny click after click—over the wall. "A great circle is the largest circle you can cut through a sphere."

“The diameter of the great circle equals the diameter of the sphere," from Ron, as he came back from the power switch.

"The summation of the angles of intersection of any three great circles within one topologically contained shape approaches five hundred and forty degrees. The summation of the angles of N great circles approaches N times one hundred and eighty degrees." Mollya intoned the definitions, which she had begun memorizing in English with the help of a personafix that morning, with her musically inflected voice. “Marbles here, yes?"

"All over, yes. Even as you can space them, but they don't have to be exact. Tell me some more about the intersections."

"Well," said Ron, "on any given sphere all great circles intersect each other—or lie congruent."

Rydra laughed. "Just like that, hey? Are there any other circles on a sphere that have to intersect no matter how you maneuver them?"

"I think you can push around any other circles so that they're equidistant at all points and don't touch. All great circles have to have at least two points in common."

"Think about that for a minute and look at these marbles, all being pulled along great circles."

Mollya suddenly floated back from the wall with an expression of recognition and brought her hands together. She blurted something in Kiswahili, and Rydra laughed. "That's right," she said. To Ron's and Calli's bewilderment she translated: "They'll move toward each other and their paths'll intersect."

Calli's eyes widened. "That's right, at exactly a quarter of the way around our orbit, they should have flattened out to a circular plane."

"Lying along the plane of our orbit," Ron finished.

Mollya frowned and made a stretching motion with her hands. "Yeah," Ron said, "a distorted circular plane with a tail at each end, from which we can compute which way the earth lies."

"Clever, huh?" Rydra moved back into the corridor opening. "I figure we can do this once, then fire our rockets enough to blast us maybe seventy or eighty mites either up or down without hurting anything. From that we can get the length of our orbit, as well as our speed. That'll be all the information we need to locate ourselves in relation to the nearest major gravitational influence. From there we can jump stasis—All our communications instruments for stasis are in working order. We can signal for help and pull in some replacements from a stasis station."

The amazed Navigators joined her in the corridor. "Count down," Rydra said.

At zero Ron released the magnetic walls. Slowly the spheres began to drift away, lining up slowly.

"Guess you learn something every day," Calli said. "If you'd asked me, I would have said we were stuck here forever. And knowing things like this is supposed to be my job. Where did you get the idea?"

"From the word for 'great circle' in . . . another language."

“Language speaking tongue?" Mollya asked. “You mean?"

"Well," Rydra took out a metal tracing plate and a stylus. "I'm simplifying it a little, but let me show you." She marked the plate. "Let's say the word for circle is: 0. This language has a melody system to illustrate comparatives. We'll represent this by the diacritical marks: v - " , respectively smallest, ordinary, and biggest. So what would 0 mean?"

"Smallest possible circle?" said Calli. "That's a single point."

Rydra nodded. “Now, when referring to a circle on a sphere, suppose the word for just an ordinary circle is O followed by either of two symbols, one of which means not touching anything else, the other of which means crossing—11 or X. What would OX mean?"

"Great circles that intersect,” said Ron.

"And because all great circles intersect, in this language the word for great circle is always OX. It carries the information right in the word. Just like busstop or foxhole carry information in English that la gare or Ie terrier—comparable words in French—lack. 'Great Circle' carries some information with it, but not the right information to get us out of the jam we're in. We have to go to another language in order to think about the problem clearly without going through all sorts of roundabout paths for the proper aspects of what we want to deal with."

"What language is this?" asked Calli.

"I don't know its real name. For now it's called Babel-17. From what little I know about it already, most of its words carry more information about things they refer to than any four or five languages I know put together, and in less space." She gave a brief translation for Mollya.

"Who speak?" Mollya asked, determined to stick to her minimal English.

Rydra bit the inside of her lip. When she asked herself that question, her stomach would tighten, her hands start toward something and the yearning for an answer grow nearly to pain in the back of her throat. It happened now; it faded. "I don't know. But I wish I did. That's what the main reason for this trip is, to find out."

"Babel-17," Ron repeated.

One of the platoon tube-boys coughed behind them.

"What is it, Carlos?"

Squat, taurine, with a lot of curly black hair, Carlos had big, loose muscles, and a slight hiss. "Captain, could I show you something?" He shifted from side to side in adolescent awkwardness, scuffing his bare soles, heat-callused from climbing over the drive tubes, against the doorsill. "Something down in the tubes. I think you should take a look at it yourself."

"Did Slug tell you to get me?"

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

"You three can take care of this business, can't you?"

"Sure, Captain." Calli looked at the closing marbles.

Rydra ducked after Carlos. They rode down the ladderlift and hunched through the low ceilinged causeway.

"Down here," Carlos said, hesitantly taking the lead beneath arched bus bars. At a mesh platform he stopped and opened a component cabinet in the wall. "See." He removed a board of printed circuits. "There." A thin crack ran across the plastic surface. "It's been broken."

"How?" Rydra asked.

"Like this." He took the plate in both hands and made a bending gesture.

"Sure it didn't crack by itself?"

"It can't," Carlos said. "When it's in place, it's supported too well. You couldn't crack it with a sledge hammer. This panel carries all the communication circuits."

Rydra nodded.

"The gyroscopic field deflectors for all our regular space maneuvering . . ." He opened another door and took out another panel. "Here."

Rydra ran her fingernail along the crack in the second plate. "Someone in the ship broke these," she said. "Take them to the shop. Tell Lizzy when she finishes reprinting them to bring them to me and I'll put them in. I'll give her the marbles back then."

II

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

At the computer console, Rydra pondered the charts. The dictionary had doubled since the trip began. Satisfaction filled one side of her mind like a good meal.

Words, and their easy pattering, facile always on her tongue, in her fingers, ordered themselves for her, revealing, defining, and revealing.

And there was a traitor. The question, a vacuum where no information would come to answer who or what or why, made an emptiness on the other side other brain, agonizing to collapse. Someone had deliberately broken those plates. Lizzy said so, too. What words for this? The names of the entire crew, and by each, a question mark.

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

At the communication board, she put on the Sensory Helmet. "Do you want to translate for me?"

The indicator light blinked acceptance. Each discorporate observer perceived the details of the gravitational and electro-magnetic flux of the stasis currents for a certain frequency with all his senses, each in his separate range. Those details were myriad, and the pilot sailed the ship through those currents as sailing ships winded the liquid ocean. But the helmet made a condensation that the captain could view for a general survey of the matrix, reduced to terms that would leave the corporate viewer sane.

She opened the helmet, covering her eyes, ears, and nose.

Flung through loops of blue and wrung with indigo drifted the complex of stations and planetoids making up the War Yards. A musical hum punctuated with bursts of static sounded over the earphones. The olfactory emitters gave a confused odor of perfumes and hot oil charged with the bitter smell of burning citrus peel. With three of her senses filled, she was loosed from the reality of the cabin to drift through sensory abstractions. It took nearly a minute to collect her sensations, to begin their interpretation.

"All right. What am I looking at?"

"The lights are the various planetoids and ring stations that make up the War Yards," the Eye explained to her. "That bluish color to the left is a radar net they have spread out toward Stellarcenter Forty-two. Those red flashes in the upper right hand corner are just a reflection of Bellatrix from a half-glazed solar-disk rotating four degrees outside your field of vision."

"What's that low humming?" Rydra asked.

"The ship's drive," the Ear explained. “Just ignore it. I'll block it out if you want."

Rydra nodded, and the hum ceased.

"That clicking—" the Ear began.

"—is morse code," Rydra finished. "I recognize that. It must be two radio amateurs that went to keep off the visual circuits."

"That's right," the Ear confirmed.

"What stinks like that?"

"The overall smell is just Betlatrix's gravitational field. You can't receive the olfactory sensations in stereo, but the burnt lemon peel is the power plant that's located in that green glare right ahead of you."

"Where do we dock?"

"In the sound of the E-minor triad."

"In the hot oil you can smell bubbling to your left."

"Home in on that white circle."

Rydra switched to the pilot. "O.K., Brass, take her in."

The saucer-disk slid down the ramp as she balanced easily in the four-fifths gravity. A breeze through the artificial twilight pushed her hair back from her shoulders. Around her stretched the major arsenal of the Alliance. Momentarily she pondered the accident of birth that had seated her firmly inside the Alliance's realm. Born a galaxy away, she might as easily have been an Invader. Her poems were popular on both sides. That was upsetting. She put the thought away. Here, gliding the Alliance War Yards, it was not clever to be upset over that—

"Captain Wong, you come under the auspices of General Forester."

She nodded as her saucer stopped.

“He forwarded us information that you are at present the expert on Babel-17."

She nodded once more. Now the other saucer paused before hers.

"I'm very happy then, to meet you, and for any assistance I can offer, please ask."

She extended her hand. "Thank you, Baron Ver Dorco."

The black of his eyebrows raised and the slash of mouth curved in the dark face, "You read heraldry?" He raised long fingers to the shield on his chest.

"I do."

"An accomplishment. Captain. We live in a world of isolated communities, each hardly touching its neighbor, each speaking, as it were, a different language."

"I speak many."

The Baron nodded. "Sometimes I believe Captain Wong, that without the Invasion, something for the Alliance to focus its energies upon, our society would disintegrate. Captain Wong—" He stopped, and the fine lines of his face shifted, contracted to concentration, then a sudden opening. "Rydra Wong . . . ?"

She nodded, smiling at his smile, yet wary before what the recognition would mean.

"I didn't realize—" He extended his hand as though he were meeting her all over again. "But, of course—" The surface of his manner shaled away, and had she never seen this transformation before she would have warmed to his warmth. "Your books, I want you to know—" The sentence trailed in a slight shaking of the head. Dark eyes too wide; lips, in their, humor, too close to a leer; hands seeking one another: it all spoke to her of a disquieting appetite for her presence, a hunger for something she was or might be, a ravenous— "Dinner at my home is served at seven." He interrupted her thought with unsettling appropriateness. "You will dine with the Baroness and myself this evening."

"Thank you. But I wanted to discuss with my crew—"

“I extend the invitation to your entire entourage. We have a spacious house, conference rooms at your disposal, as well as entertainment, certainly less confined than your ship." The tongue, purplish and flickering behind white, white teeth; the brown lines of his lips, she thought, form words as languidly as the slow mandibles of the cannibal mantis.

“Please come a little early so we can prepare you—"

She caught her breath, then felt foolish; a faint narrowing of his eyes told her he had registered, though not understood, her start.

“—for your tour through the yards. General Forester has suggested you be made privy to all our efforts against the Invaders. That is quite an honor, Madam. There are many well-seasoned officers at the yards who have not seen some of the things you will be shown. A good deal of it will probably be tedious, I dare say. In my opinion, it's stuffing you with a lot of trivial tidbits. But some of our attempts have been rather ingenious. We keep our imaginations simmering."

This man brings out the paranoid in me, she thought. I don't like him. "I'd prefer not to impose on you, Baron. There are some matters on my ship that I must—"

"Do come. Your work here will be much facilitated if you accept my hospitality, I assure you. A woman of your talent and accomplishment would be an honor to my house. And recently I have been starved"—dark lips slid together over gleaming teeth—"for intelligent conversation."

She felt her jaw clamp involuntarily on a third ceremonious refusal. But the Baron was saying: "I will expect you, and your crew, leisurely, before seven."

The saucer-disk slid away over the concourse. Rydra looked back at the ramp where her crew waited, silhouetted against the false evening. Her disk began to negotiate the slope to the Rimbaud.

"Well," she said to the little albino cook who had just come out of his pressure bandage the day before, "you're off tonight. Slug, the crew's going out to dinner. See if you can brush the kids up on their table manners—make sure every one knows which knife to eat his peas with, and all that."

"The salad fork is the little one on the outside," the Slug announces suavely, turning to the platoon.

"And what about the little one outside that?" Allegra asked.

"That's for oysters."

"But suppose they don't serve oysters?"

Flop rubbed his underlip with the knuckle of his thumb. "I guess you could pick your teeth with it."

Brass dropped a paw on Rydra's shoulder. "How you feel, Ca'tain?"

"Like a pig over a barbecue pit."

"You look sort of done—" Calli began.

"Done?" she asked.

“—in," he finished, quizzically.

"Maybe I've been working too hard. We're guests at the Baron VerDorco's this evening. I suppose we can all relax a bit there."

"VerDorco?" asked Mollya.

"He's in charge of coordinating the various research projects against the Invaders."

"This is where they make all the bigger and better secret weapons?" Ron asked.

"They also make smaller, more deadly ones. I imagine it should be an education."

"These sabotage attem'ts," Brass said. She had given them a rough idea of what was going on. "A successful one here at the War Yards could be 'retty bad to our efforts against the Invaders."

"It’s about as central a hit as they could try, next to planting a bomb in Administrative Alliance Headquarters itself."

"Will you be able to stop it?" Slug asked.

Rydra shrugged, turning to the shimmering absences of the discorporate crew. "I've got a couple of ideas. Look, I'm going to ask you guys to be sort of inhospitable this evening and do some spying. Eyes, I want you to stay on the ship and make sure you're the only one here. Ears, once we leave for the Baron's, go invisible and from then on, don't get more than six feet away from me until we're all back to the ship. Nose, you run messages back and forth. There's something going on that I don't like. I don't know whether it's my imagination or what."

The Eye spoke something ominous. Ordinarily, the corporate could only converse with the discorporate—and remember the conversation—over special equipment. Rydra solved the problem by immediately translating whatever they spoke to her into Basque before the weak synapses broke. Though the original words were lost, the translation remained: Those broken circuit plates weren't your imagination, was the gist of the Basque she retained.

She looked over the crew with gnawing discomfort. If one of the kids or officers was merely psychotically destructive, it would show up on his psyche index. There was among them, a consciously destructive one. It hurt, like an unlocatable splinter in the sole of her foot that jabbed occasionally with the pressure of walking. She remembered how she had searched them from the night. Pride. Warm pride in the way their functions meshed as they moved her ship through the stars. The warmth was the relieved anticipation for all that could go wrong with the machine-called-the-ship, if the machine-called-the-crew were not interlocked and precise. Cool pride in another part of her mind, at the ease with which they moved by one another: the kids, inexperienced both in living and working; the adults, so near pressure situations that might have scarred their polished efficiency and made psychic burrs to snag one another. But she had chosen them, and the ship, her world, was a beautiful place to walk, work, live,-for a journey's length.

But there was a traitor.

That shorted something. Somewhere in Eden, now . . . she recalled, again looking over the crew. Somewhere in Eden, now, a worm, a worm. Those cracked plates told her: the worm wanted to destroy not just her, but the ship, its crew and contents, slowly. No blades plunged in the night, no shots from around a corner, no cord looped on the throat as she entered a dark cabin. Babel-17, how good a language would it be to argue with for your life?

"Slug, the Baron wants me to come soon and see some of the latest methods of slaughter. Have the kids there decently early, will you? I'm leaving now. Eye and Ear, hop aboard."

"Righto, Captain," from Slug. The discorporate crew deperceptualized. She leaned her sled over the ramp again and slid away from the milling youngsters and officers, curious at the source of her apprehension.

III

"GROSS, UNCIVILIZED weapons." The Baron gestured toward the row of plastic cylinders increasing in size along the rack. "It's a shame to waste time on such clumsy contraptions. The little one there can demolish an area of about fifty square miles. The big ones leave a crater twenty-seven miles deep and a hundred and fifty across. Barbaric. I frown on their use. That one on the left is more subtle: it explodes once with enough force to demolish a good size building, but the bomb casing itself is hidden and unhurt under the rubble. Six hours later it explodes again and does the damage of a fair-sized atomic bomb. This leaves the victims enough time to concentrate their reclamation forces, all sorts of reconstruction workers. Red Cross Nurses, or whatever the Invaders call them, lots of experts determining the size of the damage. Then poof. A delayed hydrogen explosion, and a good thirty or forty miles crater. It doesn't do as much physical damage as even the smallest of these others, but it gets rid of a lot of equipment and busybody do-gooders. Still, a school-boy's weapon. I keep them in my own personal collection just to show them we have standard fare."

She followed him through the archway into the next hall. There were filing cabinets along the wall and single display case in the center of the room.

"Now here is one I'm justly proud of." The Baron walked to the case and the transparent walls fell apart.

"What," Rydra asked, "exactly is it?"

"What does it look like?"

"A . . . piece of rock."

"A chunk of metal," corrected the Baron.

"Is it explosive, or particularly hard?"

"It won't go bang," he assured her. "Its tensile strength is a bit over titanium steel, but we have much harder plastics."

Rydra started to extend her hand, then thought to ask, "May I pick it up and examine it?"

"I doubt it," the Baron said. "Try."

"What will happen?"

"See for yourself."

She reached out to take the dull chunk. Her hand closed on air two inches above the surface. She moved her fingers down to touch it, but they came together inches to the side—Rydra frowned.

She moved her hand to the left, but it was on the other side of the strange shard.

"Just a moment." The Baron smiled, picked up the fragment, "Now if you saw this just lying on the ground, you wouldn't look twice, would you?"

"Poisonous?" Rydra suggested. "Is it a component of something else?"

"No." The Baron turned the shape about thoughtfully. “Just highly selective. And obliging." He raised his hand. "Suppose you needed a gun"—in the Barons's hand now was a sleek vibra-gun of a model later than she had ever seen—"or a crescent wrench." Now he held a foot long wrench. He adjusted the opening. "Or a machete." The blade glistened as he waved his arm back. "Or a small crossbow." It had a pistol grip and a bow length of not quite ten inches. The spring, however, was doubled back on itself and held with quarter inch bolts. The Baron pulled the trigger—there was no arrow—and the thump of the release, followed by the continuous pinnnnnng of the vibrating tensile bar, set her teeth against one another.

"It's some sort of illusion," Rydra said. "That's why I couldn't touch it."

"A metal punch," said the Baron. It appeared in his hand, a hammer with a particularly thick head. He swung it against the floor of the case that had held the 'weapon' with a strident clang. "There."

Rydra saw the circular indentation left by the hammerhead, Raised in the middle was the faint shape of the Ver Dorco shield. She moved the tips of her fingers over the bossed metal, still warm from impact.

"No illusion," said the Baron. "That crossbow will put a six inch shaft completely through three inches of oak at forty yards. And the vibra-gun—I'm sure you know what it can do."

He held the—it was a chunk of metal again—above its stand in the case. "Put it back for me."

She stretched her hand beneath his, and he dropped the chunk. Her fingers closed to grab it. But it was on the standard again.

"No hocus-pocus. Merely selective and . . . obliging."

He touched the edge of the case and the plastic sides closed over the display. "A clever plaything. Let's look at something else."

"But how does it work?"

Ver Dorco smiled. "We've managed to polarize alloys of the heavier elements so that they exist only on certain perceptual matrices. Otherwise, they deflect-That means that, besides visually—and we can blank that out as well—it's undetectable. No weight, no volume; all it has is inertia. Which means simply by carrying it aboard any hyperstasis craft, you'll put its drive controls out of commission. Two or three grams of this anywhere near the inertia-stasis system will create all sorts of unaccounted-for strain. That's its major function right there. Smuggle that on board the Invaders' ships and we can stop worrying about them. The rest—that's child's play. An unexpected property of polarized matter is tensile-memory." They moved toward an archway into the next room. "Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules. At any angle to the direction that the matter has been polarized in, each molecule has completely free movement. Just jar it, and it falls into that structure like a rubber figure returning to shape." The Baron glanced back at the case. "Simple, really. There"—he motioned toward the filing cabinets along the wall—"is the real weapon."

Approximately three thousand individual plans incorporating that little polarized chunk. The 'weapon' is the knowledge of what to do with what you have. In hand-to-hand combat, a six-inch length of vanadium wire can be deadly. Inserted directly into the inner corner of the eye, piercing diagonally across the frontal lobes, then brought quickly down, it punctures the cerebellum, causing general paralysis; thrust completely in,' and it will mangle the joint of spinal cord and the medulla:

Death. You can use the same piece of wire to short out a Type 27-QX communications unit, which is the sort currently employed in the Invaders' stasis systems."

Rydra felt the muscles along her spine lighten—The repulsion, which she had quelled till now, came flooding back.

"This next display is from the Borgia. The Borgia," he laughed, "my nickname for our toxicology department. Again, some terribly gross products." He picked a sealed glass phial from a wall rack. "Pure diphtheria toxin. Enough here to make the reservoir of a good-sized city fatal."

"But standard vaccination procedure—" Rydra began.

"Diphtheria toxin, my dear. Toxin! Back when contagious diseases were a problem, you know, they would examine the corpses of diphtheria victims and discover nothing but a few hundred thousand baccilli, all in the victim's throat. Nowhere else. With any other sort of bacillis, that's enough of an infection to cause a minor cough. It took years to discover what was going on. That tiny number of bacilli produced an even tinier bit of a substance that is still the most deadly natural organic compound we know of. The amount required to kill a man—oh, I'd even say thirty or forty men—is, for all practical purposes, undetectable. Up till now, even with all our advances, the only way you could obtain it was from an obliging diphtheria bacillus. The Borgia has-changed that." He pointed to another bottle. "Cyanide, the old war horse! But then, the telltale smell of almonds—are you hungry? We can go up for cocktails any time you wish."

She shook her head, quickly and firmly.

"Now these are delicious. Catalytics." He moved his hand from one phial to the next. "Color blindness, total blindness, tone deafness, complete deafness, ataxia, amnesia, and on and on." He dropped his hand and smiled like a hungry rodent. "And they're all controlled by this. You see, the problem with anything of such a specific effect is that you have to introduce comparatively huge amounts of it. All these require at least a tenth of a gram or more. So, catalytics. None of what I've shown you would have any effect at all even if you swallowed the whole phial." He lifted the last container he had pointed to and pressed a stud at the end and there was a faint hiss of escaping gas. "Until now. A perfectly harmless atomized steroid."

"Only it activates the poisons here to produce . . . those effects?"

"Exactly," smiled the Baron. "And the catalyst can be in doses nearly as microscopic as the diphtheria toxin. The contents of that blue jar will give you a mild stomachache and minor head pains for half an hour. Nothing more. The green one beside it: total cerebral atrophy over a period of a week. The victim becomes a living vegetable the rest of his life. The purple one: death." He raised his hands, palms up, and laughed. "I'm famished." The hands dropped, "Shall we go back to dinner?"

Ask him what's in that room over there, she said to herself, and would have dismissed the passing curiosity, but she was thinking in Basque: it was a message from her discorporate bodyguard, invisible beside her.

"When I was a child, Baron"—she moved toward the door—"soon after I came to Earth, I was taken to the circus. It was the first time I had ever seen so many things so close together that were so fascinating. I wouldn't go home till almost an hour after they had intended to leave. What do you have in this room?"

Surprise in the little movement in the muscles of his forehead.

She smiled. "Show me."

He bowed his head in mocking, semi-formal aquiescence. "Modem warfare can be fought on so many delightfully different levels," he continued, walking to her side as if no interruption of the tour had been suggested. "One wins a battle by making sure one's troops have enough blunderbusses and battle axes like the ones you saw in the first room; or by the well-placed six-inch length of vanadium wire in a Type 27-QX communications unit. With the proper orders delayed, the encounter never takes place. Hand-to-hand weapons, survival kit, plus training, room, and board: three thousand credits per unlisted stellarman over a period of two years active duty. For a garrison of fifteen hundred men that's an outlay of four million, five hundred credits. That same garrison will live in and fight from three hyperstasis battleships, which, fully-equipped, run about a million and a half credits apiece—a total outlay of nine million credits. We have spent, on occasion, perhaps as much as a million on the preparation of a single spy or saboteur. That is rather higher than usual. And I believe a six-inch length of vanadium wire costs a third of a cent. War is costly. And although it has taken some time, Administrative Alliance Headquarters is beginning to realize subtlety pays. This way. Miss—Captain Wong."

Again they were in a room with only a single display case, but it was seven feet high.

A statue, Rydra thought. No, real flesh, with detail of muscle and joint; no, it must be a statue because a human body, dead or in suspended animation, doesn't look that—alive. Only art could produce that vibrancy.

"So you see, the proper spy is important." Though the door had opened automatically, the Baron held it with his hand in vestigial politeness.' This is one of our more expensive models. Still well under a million credits, but one of my favorites, though in practice he has his faults. With a few minor alterations I would like to make him a permanent part of our arsenal."

"A model of a spy?" Rydra asked. "Some sort of robot or android?"

"Not at all." They approached the display case. "We made a half a dozen TW-55's. It took the most exacting genetic search. Medical science has progressed so that all sorts of hopeless human refuse lives and reproduces at a frightening rate—inferior creatures that would have been too weak to survive a handful of centuries ago. We chose our parents carefully, and then with artificial insemination we got our half dozen zygotes, three male, three female. We raised them in, oh, such a carefully controlled nutrient environment, speeding the growth rate by hormones and other things— But the beauty of it was the experimental imprinting. Gorgeously healthy creatures; you have no idea how much care they received."

"I once spent a summer on a cattle farm," Rydra said shortly.

The Baron's nod was brisk. "We'd used the experimental imprints before, so we knew what we were doing. But never to synthesize completely the life situation of, say, a sixteen year old human. Sixteen was the physiological age we brought them to in six months. Look for yourself what a splendid specimen it is. The reflexes are fifty percent above a human aged normally. The human musculature is beautifully engineered: a three-day-starved, six-month-atrophied myasthenia gravis case, can, with the proper stimulant drugs, overturn a ton and a half automobile. It will kill him—but that's still remarkable efficiency. Think what the biologically perfect body, operating, at all times, on point nine-nine efficiency, could accomplish in physical strength alone."

"I thought hormone growth incentive had been outlawed. Doesn't it reduce the life span some drastic amount?”

"To the extent we used it, the life span reduction is seventy-five percent and over." He might have smiled the same way watching some odd animal at its incomprehensible antics. "But, Madam, we are making weapons. If TW-55 can function twenty years at peak efficiency, then it will have outlasted the average battle cruiser by five years. But the experimental imprinting! To find among ordinary men someone who can function as a spy, is willing to function as a spy, you must search the fringes of neurosis, often psychosis. Though such deviations might mean strength in a particular area, it always means an overall weakness in the personality. Functioning in any but that particular area, a spy may be dangerously inefficient. And the Invaders have psyche-indices too which will keep the average spy out of any place we might want to put him. Captured, a good spy is a dozen times as dangerous as a bad one— Post-hypnotic suicide suggestions and the like are easily gotten around with drugs; and are wasteful. TW-55 here will register perfectly normal on a psyche integration. He has about six hours of social conversation, plot synopses of the latest novels, political situations, music and art criticism—I believe in the course of an evening he is programmed to drop your name twice, an honor you share only with Ronald Ouar. He has one subject on which he can expound with scholarly acumen for an hour and a half—this one is 'haptoglobin grouping among the marsupials,' I believe. Put him in formal wear and he will be perfectly at home at an ambassadorial ball or a coffee break at a high-level government conference. He is a crack assassin, expert with all the weapons you have seen up till now, and more. TW-55 has twelve hours worth of episodes in fourteen different dialects, accents, or jargons concerning sexual conquests, gambling experiences, fisticuff encounters, and humorous anecdotes of semi-illegal enterprises, all of which failed miserably. Tear his shirt, smear grease on his face and slip a pair of overalls on him, and he could be a service mechanic on any one of a hundred spaceyards or stellarcenters on the other side of the Snap. He can disable any space drive system, communications components, radar works, or alarm system used by the Invaders in the past twenty years with little more than—"

"Six inches of vanadium wire?"

The Baron smiled. "His fingerprints and retina pattern, he can alter at will. A little neural surgery has made all the muscles of his face voluntary, which means he can alter his face structure drastically. Chemical dies and hormone banks beneath the scalp enable him to color his hair in seconds, or, if necessary, shed it completely and grow a new batch in half an hour. He's a past master in the psychology and physiology of coercion."

"Torture?"

"If you will. He is totally obedient to the people whom he has been conditioned to regard as his superiors; totally destructive toward what he has been ordered to destroy. There is nothing in that beautiful head even akin to a super-ego.”

"He is . . ." and she wondered at herself speaking, "beautiful." The dark lashed eyes with lids about to quiver open, the broad hands hung at the naked thighs, fingers half-curled, about to straighten or become a fist. The display light was misty on the tanned, yet near translucent skin. "You say this isn't a model, but really alive?"

"Oh, more or less. But it's rather firmly fixed in something like a yoga trance, or a lizard's hibernation. I could activate it for you—but it's ten to seven. We don't want to keep the others waiting at the table now, do we?"

She looked away from the figure in glass to the dull, taut skin of the Baron's face. His jaw, beneath his faintly concave cheek, was involuntarily working on its hinge.

"Like the circus," Rydra said. "But I'm older now. Come." It was an act of will to offer her arm. His hand was paper dry, and so light she had to strain to keep from flinching.

IV

"CAPTAIN WONG, I am delighted."

The Baroness extended her plump hand, of a pink and gray hue suggesting something parboiled. Her puffy freckled shoulders heaved beneath the straps of an evening dress tasteful enough over her distended figure, yet still grotesque.

"We have so little excitement here at the Yards that when someone as distinguished as yourself pays a visit . . ." She let the sentence end in what would have been an ecstatic smile, but the weight of her doughy cheeks distorted it into something porcine and inflated.

Rydra held the soft, malleable fingers as short a time as politeness allowed and returned the smile. She remembered, as a little girl, being obliged not to cry through punishment. Having to smile was worse. The Baroness seemed a muffled, vast, vacuous silence. The small muscle shifts, those counter communications that she was used to in direct conversation, were blunted in the Baroness under the fat. Even though the voice came from the heavy lips in strident little screeches, it was as though they talked through blankets.

"But your crew! We intended them all to be present. Twenty-one, now I know that's what a full crew consists of." She shook her finger in patronizing disapproval. "I read up on these things, you know. And there are only eighteen of you here."

"I thought the discorporate members might remain on the ship," Rydra explained. "You need special equipment to talk with them and I thought they might upset your other guests. They're really more content with themselves for company and they don't eat."

They're having barbecued lamb for dinner and you'll go to hell for lying, she commented to herself—in Basque.

"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." Rydra wondered whether the Baron had discorporate detecting equipment operating, as the Baroness leaned toward her and whispered confidentially, "Your crew has enchanted everybody! Shall we go on?"

With the Baron on her left—his palm a parchment sling for her forearm—and the Baroness leaning on her right—breathy and damp—they walked from the white stone foyer into the hall.

"Hey, Captain!" Calli bellowed, striding towards them from a quarter of the way across the room. "This is a pretty fine place, huh?" With his elbows he gestured around at the crowded hall, then held up his glass to show the size of his drink. He pursed his lips and nodded approvingly. "Let me get you some of these, Captain." Now he raised a handful of tiny sandwiches, olives stuffed with liver, and bacon-wrapped prunes. "There's a guy with a whole tray full running around over there." He pointed again with his elbow. "Ma'am, sir"—he looked from the Baroness to the Baron—"can I get you some, too?" He put one of the sandwiches in his mouth and followed it with a gulp from his glass. "Uhmpmnle."

"I’ll wait till he brings them over here," the Baroness said.

Amused, Rydra glanced at her hostess, but there was a smile, much more the proper size, winding through her fleshy features. "I hope you like them."

Calli swallowed. "I do." Then he screwed up his face, set his teeth, opening his lips and shook his head. "Except those real salty ones with the fish. I didn't like those at all, ma'am. But the rest are O.K."

"I'll tell you"—the Baroness leaned forward, the smile crumbling into a chesty chuckle—"I never really like the salty ones either!"

She looked from Rydra to the Baron with a shrug of mock surrender. "But one is so tyrannized by one's caterer nowadays, what can one do?"

"If I didn't like them," Calli said, jerking his head aside in determination, "I'd tell him don’t bring none!"

The Baroness looked back with raised eyebrows. "You know, you're perfectly right' That's exactly what I'm going to do!" She peered across Rydra to her husband. "That's just what I'm going to do, Felix, next time."

A waiter with a tray of glasses said, "Would you care for a drink?"

"She don't want one of them little tiny ones," Calli said, gesturing toward Rydra. "Get her a big one like I got."

Rydra laughed. "I'm afraid I have to be a lady tonight, Calli."

"Nonsense!" cried the Baroness. "I want a big one, too. Now let's see, I put the bar somewhere over there, didn't I?"

"That's where it was when I saw it last," Calli said.

"We're here to have fun this evening, and nobody is going to have fun with one of those." She seized Rydra's arm and called back to her husband, "Felix, be sociable," and led Rydra away. "That's Dr. Keebling. The woman with the bleached hair is Dr. Crane, and that's my brother-in-law, Albert. I'll introduce you on the way back. They're all my husband's colleagues. They work with him on those dreadful things he was showing you in the cellar. I wish he wouldn't keep his private collection in the house. It's gruesome. I'm always afraid one of them will crawl up here in the middle of the night and chop our heads off. I think he's trying to make up for his son. You know we lost our little boy Nyles—I think it's been eight years. Felix has thrown himself totally into his work since. But that's a terribly glib explanation, isn't it? Captain Wong, do you find us dreadfully provincial?"

"Not at all."

"You should. But then, you don't know any of us well, do you. Oh, the bright young people who come here, with their bright, lively imaginations. They do nothing all day long but think of ways to kill. It's a terribly placid society, really. But, why shouldn't it be? All its aggressions are vented from nine to five. Still, I think it does something to our minds. Imagination should be used for something other than pondering murder, don't you think?"

"I do." Concern grew for the weighty woman.

Just then they were stopped by clotted guests.

"What's going on here?" demanded the Baroness. "Sam, what are they doing in there?"

Sam smiled, stepped back, and the Baroness wedged herself into the space, still clutching Rydra's arm.

"Hold 'em back some!" Rydra recognized Lizzy's voice. Someone else moved and she could see. The kids from Drive had cleared a space ten feet across, and were guarding it like junior police. Lizzy crouched with three boys, who, from their dress, were local gentry of Armsedge, "What you have to understand," she was saying, "is that it's all in the wrist." She flipped a marble with her thumbnail: it struck first one, then another, and one of the struck ones struck a third.

"Hey, do that again!"

Lizzy picked up another marble. "Only one knuckle on the floor, now, so you can pivot. But it's mostly from the wrist."

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

The Baroness touched her breast. "Lovely shot! Perfectly lovely!" She remembered herself and glanced back. "Oh, you must want to watch this, Sam. You're the ballistics expert, anyway." With polite embarrassment she relinquished her place and turned to Rydra as they continued across the floor. 'There-There, that is why I'm so glad you and your crew came to see us this evening. You bring something so cool and pleasing, so fresh, so crisp."

"You speak about us as though we were a salad." Rydra laughed. In the Baroness the 'appetite’ was not so menacing.

"I dare say if you stayed here long enough we would devour you, if you let us. What you bring we are very hungry for."

"What is it?"

They arrived at the bar, then turned with their drinks. The Baroness' face strained toward hardness. "Well, you . . . you come to us and immediately we start to leam things, things about you, and ultimately about ourselves."

"I don't understand.

“Take your Navigator. He likes his drinks big and all the hors d'oeuvres except the anchovies. That's more than I know about the likes and dislikes of anyone else in the room. You offer Scotch, they drink Scotch. You offer tequila, tequila they down by the gallon. And just a moment ago I discovered"—she shook her supine hand—"that it's all in the wrist. I never knew that before."

"We're used to talking to each other."

"Yes, but you tell the important things. What you like, what you don't like, how to do things. Do you really want to be introduced to all those stuffy men and women who kill people?"

"Not really."

"Didn't think so. And I don't want to bother myself. Oh, there are three or four who I think you would like. But I'll see that you meet them before you leave." And she barreled into the crowd.

Tides, Rydra thought. Oceans, Hyperstasis currents. Or the movement of people in a large room. She drifted along the least resistant ways that pulsed open, then closed as someone moved to meet someone, to get a drink, to leave a conversation.

Then there was a corner, a spiral stair. She climbed, pausing as she came around the second turn to watch the crowd beneath. There was a double door ajar at the top, a breeze. She stepped outside.

Violet had been replaced by artful, cloud-streaked purple. Soon the planetoid's chromadome would simulate night. Moist vegetation lipped the railing. At one end, the vines had completely covered the white stone.

"Captain?"

Ron, shadowed and brushed with leaves, sat in the corner of the balcony, hugging his knees. Skin is not silver, she thought, yet whenever I see him that way, curled up in himself, I picture a knot of white metal. He lifted his chin from his kneecaps and put his back against the verdant hedge so there were leaves in his com-silk hair.

"What're you doing?"

“Too many people."

She nodded, watching him press his shoulders downward, watching his triceps leap on the bone, then still. With each breath in the gnarled, young body the tiny movements sang to her. She listened to the singing for nearly half a minute while he watched her, sitting still, yet always the tiny entrancements. The rose on his shoulder whispered against the leaves. When she had listened to the muscular music a while, she asked:

"Trouble between you, Mollya, and Calli?"

"No. I mean . . . just . . ."

"Just what?" She smiled and leaned on the balcony edge.

He lowered his chin to his knees again. "I guess they're fine. But, I'm the youngest . . . and . . ." Suddenly the shoulders raised. "How the hell would you understand! Sure, you know about things like this, but you don't really know. You write what you see. Not what you do." It came out in little explosions of half whispered sound. She heard the words and watched the jaw muscle jerk and beat and pop a small beast inside his cheek. "Perverts," he said. "That's what you Customs all really think. The Baron and the Baroness, all those people in there staring at us, who can't understand why you could want more than two— And you can't understand either."

"Ron?"

He snapped his teeth on a leaf and yanked it from the stem.

"Five years ago, Ron, I was . . . tripled."

The face turned to her as if pulling against a spring, then yanked back. He spit the leaf. "You're Customs, Captain. You circle-Transport, but just the way you let them eat you up with their eyes, the way they turn and watch to see who you are when you walk by: you're a Queen, yeah, but a Queen in Customs. You're not Transport."

"Ron, I'm public. That's why they look. I write books. Customs people read them, yes, but they look because they want to know who the hell wrote them. Customs didn't write them. I talk to Customs and Customs looks at me and says: 'You're Transport.' " She shrugged. "I'm neither. But even so, I was tripled. I know about that."

"Customs don't triple," he said.

"Two guys and myself. If I ever do it again it'll be with a girl and a guy. For me that would be easier, I think. But I was tripled for three years. That's over twice as long as you've been.

"Yours didn't stick, then. Ours did. At least it was sticking together with Cathy."

"One was killed," Rydra said. "One is in suspended animation at Hippocrates General waiting for them to discover a cure for Caulder's disease. I don't think it will be in my lifetime, but if it is—" In the silence he turned to her. "What is it?" she asked.

"Who were they?"

"Customs or Transport?" She shrugged. "Like me, neither really. Fobo Lombs, he was captain of an interstellar transport; he was the one who made me go through and get my Captain's papers. Also he worked planetside doing hydroponics research, working on storage methods for hyperstatic hauls. Who was he? He was slim and blond and wonderfully affectionate and drank too much sometimes, and would come back from a trip and get drunk and in a fight and in jail, and we'd bail him out—really it only happened twice—but we teased him with it for a year. And he didn't like to sleep in the middle of the bed because he always wanted to let one arm hang over."

Ron laughed, and his hands, grasping high on his forearms, slid to his wrists.

“He was killed in a cave-in exploring the Ganymede Catacombs during the second summer that the three of us worked together on the Jovian Geological Survey."

"Like Cathy," Ron said, after a moment.

"Muels Aranlyde was—"

"Empire Star!" Ron said, his eyes widening, "and the 'Comet Jo' books! You were tripled with Muels Aranlyde?"

She nodded.' Those books were a lot of fun, weren' t-they?"

"Hell, I musfve read all of them," Ron said. His knees came apart. "What sort of a guy was he? Was he anything like Comet?"

"As a matter of fact, Comet Jo started out to be Fobo. Fobo would get involved in something or other, I'd get upset, and Muels would start another novel."

"You mean they're like true stories?"

She shook her head. "Most of the books are just all the fantastic things that could have happened, or that we worried might have happened. Muels himself? In the books he always disguises himself as a computer. He was dark, and withdrawn, and incredibly patient and incredibly kind. He showed me all about sentences and paragraphs—did you know the emotional unit in writing is the paragraph?—and how to separate what you can say from what you can imply, and when to do one or the other—"She stopped. "Then he'd give me a manuscript and say, ‘Now you tell me what's wrong with the words.' The only thing I could ever find was that there were too many of them. It was just after Fobo was killed that I really got down to my poetry. Muels used to tell me if I ever would, I'd be great because I knew so much about its elements to start. I had to get down to something then, because Fobo was . . . but you know about that, though. Muels caught Caulder's disease about four months later. Neither one of them saw my first book, though they'd seen most of the poems. Maybe someday Muels will read them. He might even write some more of Comet's adventures— and maybe even go to the Morgue and call back my thinking pattern and ask, ‘Now you tell me what's wrong with the words'; and I'll be able to tell him so much more, so much. But there won't be any consciousness left . . ." She felt herself drift toward the dangerous emotions, let them get as close as they would. Dangerous or not, it had been three years since her emotions had scared her too much to watch them.

" . . .so much more." Ron sat cross-legged now, forearms on his knees, hands hanging, "Empire Star and Comet Jo; we had so much fun with those stories, whether it was arguing about them all night over coffee, or correcting galleys, or sneaking into bookshops and pulling them out from behind the other books."

"I used to do that, too," Ron said. "But just "cause I liked them."

"We even had fun arguing about who was going to sleep in the middle."

It was like a cue. Ron began to pull back together, knees rising, arms locking around them, chin down. "I got both of mine, at least," he said. "I guess I should be pretty happy."

"Maybe you should. Maybe you shouldn't. Do they love you?"

"They say so."

"Do you love them?"

"Christ, yes. I talk to Mollya and she's trying to explain something to me and she still don't talk so good yet, but suddenly I figure out what she means, and . . ." He straightened his body and looked up as though the word he was searching for was someplace high.

"It's wonderful," she supplied.

"Yeah, it's—"He looked at her. "It's wonderful."

"You and Calli?"

"Hell, Calli's just a big old bear and I can tumble him around and play with him. But it's him and Mollya. He still can't understand her so well. And because I'm the youngest, he thinks he should learn quicker than me. And he doesn't, so he keeps away from both of us. Now like I say, when he gets in a mood, I can always handle him. But she's new, and thinks he's mad at her."

"Want to know what to do?" Rydra asked, after a moment.

"Do you know?"

She nodded. "It hurts more when there's something wrong between them because there doesn't seem to be anything you can do. But it's easier to fix."

"Why?"

"Because they love you."

He was waiting now.

"Calli gets into one of his moods, and Mollya doesn't know how to get through to him."

Ron nodded.

"Mollya speaks another language, and Calli can't get through that."

He nodded again.

"Now you can communicate with both of them. You can't act as a go-between; that never works. But you can teach each of them how to do what you know already."

"Teach?"

"What do you do with Calli when he gets moody?"

"I pull his ears," Ron said. "He tells me to cut it out until he starts laughing, and then I roll him around on the floor."

Rydra made a face. "It's unorthodox, but if it works, fine. Now show Mollya how. She's athletic. Let her practice on you till she gets it right, if you have to."

"I don't like to get my ears pulled," Ron said.

"Sometimes you have to make sacrifices." She tried not to smile and smiled anyway.

Ron rubbed his left earlobe with the ham of his thumb. "I guess so."

"And you have to teach Calli the words to get through to Mollya."

"But I don't know the words myself, sometimes. I can just guess better than he can."

"If he knew the words, would it help?"

"Sure.”

"I've got a Kiswahili grammar in my cabin. Pick it up when we get back to the ship."

"Hey, that would be fine—" He stopped, withdrawing just a bit into the leaves. "Only Calli don't read much or anything."

"You'll help him."

"Teach him," Ron said.

"That's right."

"Do you think he'll do it?" Ron asked.

"To get closer to Mollya?" asked Rydra. "Do you think so?"

"He will." Like metal unbending, Ron suddenly stood. "He will."

"Are you going inside now?" she asked. "We'll be eating in a few minutes."

Ron turned to the rail and looked at the vivid sky. "They keep a beautiful shield up here."

"To keep from being burned up by Bellatrix," Rydra said.

"So they don't have to think about what they're doing."

Rydra raised her eyebrows. Still the concern over right and wrong, even amidst domestic confusion. "That, too," she said and wondered about the war.

His tensing back told her he would come later, wanted to think some more. She went through the double doors and started down the staircase.

"I saw you go out, and I thought I'd wait for you to come back in."

Deja vu, she thought. But she couldn't have seen him before in her life. Blue-black hair over a face craggy for its age in the late twenties. He stepped back to make way for her on the stairway with an incredible economy of movement. She looked from hands to face for a gesture revealing something. He watched her back, giving nothing; then he turned and nodded toward the people below. He indicated the Baron, who stood alone toward the middle of the room. "Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look."

"I wonder how hungry he is?" Rydra said, and felt strange again.

The Baroness was churning toward her husband through the crowd, to ask advice about whether to begin dinner or wait another five minutes, or some other equally desperate decision.

“What must a marriage between two people like that be?" the stranger asked with austerely patronizing amusement.

"Comparatively simple, I suppose," Rydra said. "They've just got each other to worry about."

A polite look of inquiry. When she offered no elucidation, the stranger turned back to the crowd. "They make such odd faces when they glance up here to see if it's you, Miss Wong."

"They leer," she said, shortly.

"Bandicoots. That's what they look like. A pack of them."

"I wonder if their artificial sky makes them seem so sickly?" She felt herself leaking a controlled hostility.

He laughed. "Bandicoots with thalassanemia!"

"I guess so. You're not from the Yards?" His complexion had a life that would have faded under the artificial sky.

"As a matter of fact, I am."

Surprised, she would have asked him more, but the loudspeakers suddenly announced: "Ladies and Gentlemen, dinner is served."

He accompanied her down the stairs, but two or three steps into the crowd she discovered he had disappeared. She continued toward the dining room alone.

Under the arch the Baron and Baroness waited for her. As the Baroness took her arm, the chamber orchestra on the dais fell to their instruments.

"Come, we're down this way."

She kept near the puffy matron through the people milling about the serpentine table that curved and twisted back on itself.

"We're over there."

And the Basque message: Captain, on your transcriber, something's coming over back on the ship. The small explosion in her mind stopped her.

"Babel-17!"

The Baron turned to her. "Yes, Captain Wong?" She watched uncertainty score tense lines on his face.

"Is there any place in the yards with particularly important materials or research going on that might be unguarded now?"

"That's all done automatically. Why?"

"Baron, there's a sabotage attack about to take place, or taking place right now."

"But how did you—"

"I can't explain now, but you'd better make sure everything is all right."

And the tension turned.

The Baroness touched her husband's arm, and said with sudden coolness. "Felix, there's your seat."

The Baron pulled out his chair, sat down, and unceremoniously pushed aside his place setting. There was a control panel beneath his doily. As people seated themselves, Rydra saw Brass, twenty feet away, lower himself on the special hammock that had been set up for his glittering, gigantic bulk.

"You sit here, my dear. We'll simply go on with the party as if nothing was happening. I think that's best."

Rydra seated herself next to the Baron, and the Baroness lowered herself carefully to the chair on her left. The Baron was whispering into a throat microphone. Pictures, which she was at the wrong angle to see clearly, flashed on the eight inch screen. He looked up long enough to say, "Nothing yet. Captain Wong."

"Ignore what he's doing," the Baron said. "This is much more interesting over here."

Into her lap she swung out a small console from where it had hung beneath the table edge.

"Ingenious little thing," the Baroness continued, looking around. "I think we're ready. There!" Her pudgy forefinger struck at one of the buttons, and lights about the room began to lower. "I control the whole meal just by pressing the right one at the right time. Watch!" She struck at another one.

Along the center of the table now, under the gentled light, panels opened and great platters of fruit, candied apples and sugared grapes, halved melons filled with honeyed nuts, rose up before the guests.

"And wine!" said the Baroness, reaching down again.

Along the hundreds of feet of table, basins rose. Sparkling froth foamed the brim as the fountain mechanism began. Spurting liquid streamed.

"Fill your glass, dear. Drink up," prompted the Baroness, raising 'her own beneath a jet; the crystal splashed with purple.

On her right the Baron said: 'The Arsenal seems to be all right. I'm alerting all the special projects. You're sure this sabotage attack is going on right now?"

"Either right now," she told him, "or within the next two or three minutes. It might be an explosion, or some major piece of equipment may fail."

"That doesn't leave me much to go on. Though communications had picked up your Babel-17. I've been alerted to how these attempts run."

"Try one of these. Captain Wong," The Baroness handed her a quartered mango which Rydra discovered, when she tasted it, had been marinated in Kirsch.

Nearly all the guests were seated now. She watched a platoon kid, named Mike, searching for his name-card halfway across the hall. And down the table length she saw the stranger who had stopped her on the spiral stair hurrying toward them behind the seated guests.

"The wine is not grape, but plum," the Baroness said. "A little heavy to start with, but so good with fruit. I'm particularly proud of the strawberries. The legumes are a hydroponicist's nightmare, you know, but this year we were able to get such lovely ones."

Mike found his seat and reached both hands into the fruit bowl. The stranger rounded the last loop of table. Calli was holding a goblet of wine in each hand, looking from one to the other, probably trying to determine the larger.

"I could be a tease," the Baroness said, "and bring out the sherbets first. Or do you think I ought best to go to the caldo verde? The way I prepare it, it's very light. I can never decide—"

The stranger reached the Baron, leaned over his shoulder to watch the screen, and whispered something. The Baron turned to him, turned back slowly with both hands on the table—and fell forward! A trickle of blood wormed from beneath his face.

Rydra jerked back in her chair. Murder. A mosaic came together in her head, and when it was together, it said: murder. She leapt up.

The Baroness exhaled hoarse breath and rose, overturning her chair. She flapped her hands hysterically toward her husband and shook her head.

Rydra whirled to see the stranger snatch a vibra-gun from beneath his jacket. She yanked the Baroness out of the way. The shot was low and struck the console.

Once moved, the Baroness staggered to her husband and grasped him. Her breathy moan took voice and became a wail. The hulking form, like a blimp deflating, sank and pulled Felix Ver Dorco's body from the table, till she was kneeling on the floor, holding him in her arms, rocking him gently, screaming.

Guests had risen now; talk became roaring.

With the console smashed, along the table the fruit platters were pushed aside by emerging peacocks, cooked, dressed, and reassembled with sugared heads, tail feathers swaying. None of the clearing mechanisms were operating. Tureens of caldo verde crowded the wine basins till both overturned, flooding the table. Fruit rolled over the edge.

Through the voices, the vibra-gun hissed on her left, left again, then right. People ran from their chairs, blocked her view. She heard the gun once more and saw Dr. Crane double over, to be caught by a surprised neighbor as her bleached hair came undone and tumbled her face.

Spitted lambs rose to upset the peacocks. Feathers swept the floor. Wine fountains spurted the glistening amber skins which hissed and steamed. Food fell back into the opening and struck red heating coils. Rydra smelled burning.

She darted forward, caught the arm of the fat, black-bearded man. "Slug, get the kids out of here!"

"What do you think I'm doing. Captain?"

She darted away, came up against a length of table, and vaulted the steaming pit. The intricate, oriental dessert—sizzling bananas dipped first in honey then rolled to the plate over a ramp of crushed ice—was emerging as she sprang. The sparkling confections shot across the ramp and dropped to the floor, honey crystallized to glittering thorns. They rolled among the guests, cracked underfoot. People slipped and flailed and fell.

"Snazzy way to slide on a banana, huh. Captain?" commented Calli. "What's going on?"

"Get Mollya and Ron back to the ship!"

Ums rose now, struck the rotisserie arrangement, overturned, and grounds and boiling coffee splattered. A woman shrieked, clutching her scalded arm.

"This ain't no fun anymore," Calli said. "I'll round them up."

He started away as Slug hurried back the other way. “Slug, what's a bandicoot?" She caught his arm again.

"Vicious little animal. Marsupial, I think. Why?"

“That’s right. I remember now. And thalassanemia?"

"Funny time to ask. Some sort of anemia."

"I know that. What sort? You're the medic on the ship."

"Let me see." He closed his eyes a moment. "I got all this once in a hypno-course. Yeah, I remember. It's hereditary, the Caucasian equivalent of sickle cell anemia, where the red blood cells collapse because the haptoglobins break down—"

"—and allow the hemoglobins to leak out and the cell gets crushed by osmotic pressure. I've figured it out. Get the hell out of here."

Puzzled, the Slug started toward the arch. Rydra started after him, slipped in wine sherbet, and grabbed Brass, who now gleamed above her. "Take it easy, Ca'tain!"

"Out of here, baby," she demanded. "And fast."

"Ho' a ride?" Grinning, he hooked his arm at his hip, and she climbed to his back, clutching his sides with her knees and holding his shoulders. The great muscles that had defeated the Silver Dragon bunched beneath her, and he leapt, clearing the table and landing on all fours. Before the fanged, golden beast, guests scattered. They made for the arched door.

V

HYSTERICAL EXHAUSTION frothed in her head.

She smashed through it, into the Rimbaud's cabin, and punched the intercom. "Slug, is every—"

"All present and accounted for. Captain."

"The discorporate—"

"Safe aboard, all three."

Brass, panting, filled the entrance hatch behind her.

She switched to another channel, and a near musical sound filled the room— "Good. It's still going."

"That's it?" asked Brass.

She nodded. "Babel-17. It's been automatically transcribed so I can study it later. Anyway, here goes nothing." She threw a switch.

"What you doing?"

"I prerecorded some messages and I'm sending them out now. Maybe they'll get through." She stopped the first take and started a second. "I don't know it well, yet. I know it a little, but not enough. I feel like someone at a performance of Shakespeare shouting catcalls in pidgin English."

An outside line signaled for her attention. "Captain Wong, this is Albert VerDorco." The voice was perturbed. "We've had a terrible catastrophe, and we're in total confusion here. I could not find you at my brother's, but flight clearance just told me you had requested immediate take off for hyperstasis jump."

"I requested nothing of the kind. I just wanted to get my crew out of there. Have you found out what's going on?"

"But, Captain, they said you were in the process of clearing for flight. You have top priority, so I can't very well countermand your order. But I called to request that you please stay until this matter is cleared up, unless you are acting on some information that—"

"We're not taking off," Rydra said.

"We better not be," interjected Brass. "I'm not wired into the ship yet."

"Apparently your automatic James Bond ran berserk," Rydra told Ver Dorco.

". . . Bond?"

"A mythological reference. Forgive me. TW-55 flipped."

"Oh, yes. I know. It assassinated my brother, and four extremely important officials. It couldn't have picked out four more key figures if it had been planned."

"It was. TW-55 was sabotaged. And no, I don't know how. I suggest you contact General Forester back at—"

"Captain, flight clearance says you're still signaling for take off! I have no official authority here, but you must—"

"Slug! Are we taking off?"

"Why, yes. Didn't you just issue orders down here for emergency hyperstasis exit?"

"Brass isn't even at his station yet, you idiot!"

"But I have just received clearance from you thirty seconds ago. Of course he's hooked in. I just spoke—"

Brass lumbered across the floor and bellowed into the microphone. "I'm standing right behind her, numbskull! What are you, gonna dive into the middle Bellatrix? Or maybe come out inside some nova? These things head for the biggest mass around when they drift!"

"But you just—"

A grinding started somewhere below them. And a sudden surge.

Over the loudspeaker from Albert VerDorco “Captain Wong!"

Rydra shouted again, "Idiot, cut the stasis gen—"

But the generators were already whistling over the roar.

And surge again; she jerked against her hands holding the desk edge, saw Brass flail one claw in the air.

And—