Babel-17

I

"WE JUST LEFT the Sna'.Ca'tain. You two drunk yet?"

Rydra's voice: "No."

"How do you like that. I guess you're all right, though."

Rydra's voice: "The brain fine. The body fine."

"Huh? Hey, Butcher, she didn't have one of her s'ells again?"

The Butcher's voice: "No."

"Both of you sound funny as hell. Shall I send the Slug u' there to take a look at you?"

The Butcher's voice: "No."

"All right. It's clear sailing now, and I can cut a cou'le of hours off. What do you say?"

The Butcher's voice: What is it to say?"

"Try 'thanks.' You know, I'm flying my tail off down here."

Rydra's voice: "Thanks."

"You're welcome, I guess. I'll leave you two alone. Hey, I'm sorry if I interru'ted something."

II

BUTCHER, I didn't know! I couldn't have known!

And in the echo their minds fused a cry. Couldn't have—couldn't. This light—

I told Brass, told him you must speak a language without the word I and I said I didn't know of one; but there was one, the obvious one, Babel-17 . . . !

Congruent synapses quivered sympathetically till images locked, and out of herself she created, saw them—

—In the solitary confinement box of Titin, he scratched a map on the green wall paint with his spur over the palimpsestic obscenities of two centuries' prisoners, a map that they would follow on his escape and would take them in the wrong direction; she watched him pace that four-foot space for three months till his six and a half foot frame was starved to a hundred and one pounds and he collapsed in the chains of starvation.

On a triple rope of words she climbed from the pit: starve, stave, stake; collapse, collate, collect; chains, change, chance.

He collected his winnings from the cashier and was about to stride across the maroon carpet of Casino Cosmica to the door when the black croupier blocked his way, smiling at the thick money case. "Would you like to take one more chance, sir? Something to challenge a player of your skill?" He was taken to a magnificent 3-D chessboard with glazed ceramic pieces.

"You play against the house computer. Against each piece you lose, you stake a thousand credits. Each piece you win, gains you the same. Checks win or lose you five hundred. Checkmate gains the winner one hundred times the rest of the game's earnings, for either you or the house." It was a game to even out his exorbitant winnings—and he had been winning exorbitantly. "Going home and take this money now," he said to the croupier. The croupier smiled and said, "The house insists you play." She watched, fascinated, while the Butcher shrugged, turned to the board—and checkmated the computer in a seven move fool's mate. They gave him his million credits—and tried to kill him three times before he got to the mouth of the casino. They did not succeed, but the sport was better than the gambling.

Watching him function and react in these situations, her mind shook inside his, curving to his pain or pleasure, strange emotions because they were ego-less and inarticulate, magic, seductive, mythical. Butcher—

She managed to interrupt the headlong circling.

—if you understood Babel-17 all along, her questions hurled in her own storming brain, why did you only use it gratuitously for yourself, an evening of gambling, a bank robbery, when a day later you would lose everything and make no attempt to keep things for yourself?

What 'self? There was no I.

She had entered him in some bewildering, reversed sexuality. Enclosing her, he was in agony. The light—you make! You make! his crying in terror.

Butcher, she asked, more familiar in patterning words about emotional turbulences than he, what does my mind in yours look like?

Bright, bright moving, he howled, the analytical precision of Babel-17, crude as stone to articulate their melding, making so many patterns, reforming them.

That's just being a poet she explained, the oblique connection momentarily cutting the flood through. Poet in Greek means maker or builder.

There's one? There's a pattern now. Ahhhh!—so bright, bright!

Just that simple semantic connection? She was astounded.

But the Greeks were poets three thousand years ago and you are a poet now. You snatch words together over such distance and their wakes blind me. Your thoughts are all fire, over shapes I cannot catch. They sound like music too deep, that shakes me.

That's because you were never shaken before. But I'm flattered.

You are so big inside me I will break. I see the pattern named The Criminal and artistic consciousness meeting in the same head with one language between them . . .

Yes, I had started to think something like-Flanking it, shapes called Baudelaire—Ahhh!—and Villon.

They were ancient French po—

Too bright! Too bright! The 'I' in me is not strong enough to hold them. Rydra, when I look at the night and stars, it is only a passive act, but you are active even watching, and halo the stars with more luminious flame.

What you perceive you change, Butcher. But you must perceive it.

I must-the light; central in you I see mirror and Motion used, and the pictures are meshed, rotating, and everything is choice.

My poems! It was the embarrassment of nakedness. Definitions of I each great and precise. She thought: I/Aye/Eye, the self, a sailor's yes, the organ of visual perception-He began, You—

You/Ewe/Yew, the other self, a female sheep, the Celtic vegetative symbol for death.

—you ignite my words with meanings I can only glimpse. What am I surrounding? What am I, surrounding you?

Still watching, she saw him commit robbery, murder, mayhem, because the semantic validity of mine and thine were ruined in a snarl of frayed synapses. Butcher, I heard it ringing in your muscles, that loneliness, that made you make Jebel hook up the Rimbaud just to have someone near you who could speak this analytical tongue, the same reason you tried to save the baby, she whispered.

Images locked on her brain.

Long grass whispered by the weir. Alleppo's moons fogged the evening. The plamsmobile hummed, and with measured impatience he flicked the ruby emblem on the steering wheel with the tip of his left spur. Lill twisted against him, laughing. "You know. Butcher, if Mr. Big thought you'd driven out there with me on such a romantic night he'd get very hostile. You're really gonna take me to Paris when you finish here?" Unnamed warmth mixed in him with unnamed impatience. Her shoulder was damp under his hand, her lips red. She had coiled her champagne colored hair high over one ear: Her body beside his moved in a rippling motion that had the excuse of her turning to face him. "If you're kidding me, about Paris, I'll tell Mr. Big. If I were a smart girl, I'd wait till after you took me there before I let us get . . . friendly." Her breath was perfumed in the sweltering night. He moved his other hand up her arm. "Butcher, get me off this hot, dead world, Swamps, caves, rain! Mr. Big scares me. Butcher! Take me away from him, to Paris. Don't just be pretending. I want to go with you so bad." She made another laughing sound with only her lips. "I guess I'm . . . I'm not a smart girl after all." He placed his mouth against her mouth—and broke her neck with one thrust of his hands. Her eyes still open, she sagged backwards. The hypodermic ampule she had been about to plunge into his shoulder fell from her hand, rolled across the dashboard, and dropped among the foot pedals. He carried her into the weir, and came back muddy to mid-thigh. In the seat he flipped on the radio. "It's finished, Mr. Big."

"Very good. I was listening. You can pick up your money in the morning. It was very silly of her to try and double cross me out of that fifty thousand."

The plainsmobile was rolling, the warm breeze drying the mud on his arms, the long grass hissing against the runners.

Butcher . . . I . . .

But that's me, Rydra.

I know. But I . . .

I had to do the same thing to Mr. Big himself two weeks later.

Where did you promise to take him?

The gambling caves of Minos. And once I had to crouch—

—Though it was his body crouching under the green light of Kreto, breathing with wide open mouth to stop all sound, it was her anticipation, her fear controlled to calm. The loader in his red uniform halts and wipes his forehead with a bandanna. Step out quickly, tap his shoulder. The loader turns, surprised, and the hands come up leading with the heel, cock spurs opening the loader's belly, which spills alt over the platform and then running, while the alarms start, vaulting the sandbags, snatching up the hawser chain and swinging it down on the amazed face of the guard standing on the other side who turned to see him with anus surprised open—

—broke into the open and got away, he told her. The trail disguise worked and the Tracers couldn't follow me past the lava pits.

Opening you up, Butcher. All the running, opening me?

Does it hurt, does it help? I don't know.

But there were no words in your mind. Even Babel-17 was like the brain noise of a computer engaged in a purely synoptical analysis.

Yes. Now do you begin to understand—

—standing, shivering in the roaring caves of Dis where he had been wombed nine months, eaten all the food, Lonny's pet dog, then Lonny who had frozen to death trying to climb over the mounded ice—till suddenly the planetoid swung out from the shadow of Cyclops and blazing Ceres flared in the sky so that in forty minutes the cave was flooded with ice water to his waist. When he finally freed his hop-sled, the water was warm and he was slimy with sweat. He ran at top speed for the two mile twilight strip, setting the automatic pilot a moment before he collapsed, dizzy with heat. He fainted ten minutes before he pulled into Gotterdammerung.

Faint in the darkness of your lost memory. Butcher, I must find you. Who were you before Nueva-nueva York?

And he turned to her in gentleness. You're afraid, Rydra? Like before . . .

No, not like before. You're leaching me something, and it's shaking my whole picture of the world and myself. I thought I was afraid before because I couldn't do what you could do. Butcher. The white flame went blue, protective, and trembled. But I was afraid because I could do all those things, and for my own reasons, not your lack of reasons, because I am, and you are. I'm a lot bigger than I thought I was, Butcher, and I don't know whether to thank you or damn you for showing me. And something inside was crying, stuttering, was still. She turned in the silences she had taken from him, fearfully, and in the silences something waited for her to speak, alone, for the first time.

Look at yourself, Rydra.

Mirrored in him, she saw growing in the light of her, a darkness without words, only noise—growing! And cried out at its name and shape. The broken circuit boards! Butcher, those tapes that could only have been made on my console when I was there! Of course-!

Rydra, we can control them if we can name them.

How can we, now? We have to name ourselves first. And you don't know who you are.

Your words, Rydra, can we somehow use your words to find out who I am?

Not my words. Butcher. But maybe yours, maybe Babel-17.

No . . .

I am, she whispered, believe me, Butcher, and you are.

III

"HEADQUARTERS, CAPTAIN. Take a look through the sensory helmet. Those radio nets look like fireworks, and corporate souls tell me it smells like corned beef hash and fried eggs. Hey, thanks for getting us dusted out. Had a tendency toward hayfever when I was alive that I never did shake."

Rydra's voice: "The crew will debark with the Captain and the Butcher. The crew will take them to General Forester, together, and not let them be separated."

The Butcher's voice: "There is a tape recording in the Captain's cabin on the console containing a grammar of Babel-17. The Slug will send that tape immediately to Dr. Markus T'mwarba on Earth by special delivery. Then inform Dr. T'mwarba by stellarphone that the tape was sent, at what time, and its contents."

"Brass, Slug! Something's wrong up there!" Ron's voice overcut the Captain's signal. "You ever heard them talk like that? Hey, Captain Wong, what's the matter . . . ?"