Babel-17 (16 page)

"All right. Cord, 
to be lord of this black barrick, 
Tarik's, you need more than jackal lore, 
or a belly full of murder and jelly knees.

Open your mouth and your hands. To understand 
power, use your wit, please.

Ambition like a liquid ruby stains 
your brain, birthed in the cervixed will to kill, swing in the arc of death's again, you name yourself victim each time you fill with swill the skull's cup lipping murder. It predicts your fingers' movement toward the blade long laid against the leather sheath cord-fixed to pick the plan your paling fingers made; you stayed in safety, missing worlds of wonder, under the lithe hiss of the personafix inflicting false memories to make them blunder while thunder cracks the change of Tarik.

You stick pins in peaches, place your strange 
blade, ranged with a grooved tooth, while the long and strong lines of my meaning make your mind change from fulgent tofrangent. Now you hear the  wrong cord-song, to instruct you. Assassin, pass in . . .

. . and she was surprised he had held up this long- She looked directly at Geoffry Cord. Geoffry Cord looked directly at her and shrieked. . .

The scream snapped something- She had been thinking in Babel-17 and choosing her English words with it. But now she was thinking in English again.

Geoffry Cord jerked his head sideways, black hair shaking, flung his table over, and ran, raging, toward her. The drugged knife which she had seen only through his mind was out and aimed at her stomach.

She jumped back, kicked at his wrist as he vaulted the platform edge, missed, but struck his face. He fell backwards, rolling on the floor.

Gold, silver, amber: Brass was running from his side of the room. Silver-haired Jebel was coming from the other, his cloak billowing. And the Butcher had already reached her, was between her and the uncoiling Cord.

"What is this?" Jebel demanded.

Cord was on one knee, knife still poised. His black eyes went from vibra-gun muzzle to vibra-gun muzzle, then to Brass' unsheathed claws. He froze. "I don't appreciate attacks on my guests."

"That knife is meant for you, Jebel," she panted. "Check the records of Tarik's personafix. He was going to kill you and get the Butcher under hypnotic control, and take over Tarik."

"Oh," Jebel said. "One of those-"He turned to the Butcher. "It was time for another one, wasn't it? About once every six months. I'm again grateful to you, Captain Wong."

The Butcher stepped forward and took the knife from Cord, whose body seemed frozen, whose eyes danced. Rydra listened to Cord's breath measure out the silence, while the Butcher, holding the knife by the blade, examined it. The blade itself, in the Butcher's heavy fingers, was printed steel. The handle, a seven-inch length of bone, was ridged, runneled, and stained with walnut dye.

With his free hand, the Butcher caught his fingers in Cord's black hair. Then, not particularly quickly, he pushed the knife to the hilt into Cord's right eye, handle first.

The scream became a gurgle. The flailing hands fell from the Butcher's shoulders. Those sitting close stood.

Rydra's heart banged twice to break her ribs. "But you didn't even check.. . . Suppose I was wrong . . . Maybe there was more to it than ..." Her tongue wagged through the meaningless protests. And maybe her heart had stopped.

The Butcher, both hands bloody, looked at her coldly. "He moved with a knife on Tarik toward Jebel or Lady and he dies." Right fist ground on left palm, now soundless with red lubricant.

"Miss Wong," Jebel said, "from what I've seen, there's little doubt in my mind that Cord was certainly dangerous. I'm sure there's not much in yours, either. You are highly useful. I am highly obliged. I hope this trip down the Dragon's Tongue proves propitious. The Butcher had just told me it was at your request that we are going."

"Thank you, but ..." Her heart was pounding again. She tried to form some clause to hang from the hook of 'but' still hesitant in her mouth. Instead she got very sick, pitched forward, half blind. The Butcher caught her on red palms.

The round, warm, blue room again. But alone, and she was at last able to think about what had happened in the commons. It was not what she'd repeatedly tried to describe to Mocky. It was what Mocky had repeatedly insisted to her: telepathy. But apparently, telepathy was the nexus of old talent and a new way of thinking. It opened worlds of perception, of action. Then why was she sick? She recalled how time slowed when her mind worked under Babel-17, how her mental processes speeded up. If there was a corresponding increase in her physiological functions, her body might not be up to the strain.

The tapes from the Rimbaud had told her the next 'sabotage' attempt would be at Administrative Alliance Headquarters. She wanted to get there with the language, the vocabulary and grammar, give it to them, and retire. She was almost ready to hand over the search for this mysterious speaker. But no, not quite, there was still something, something to be heard and spoken . . .

Sick and falling, she snagged on bloody fingers, woke starting. The Butcher's egoless brutality, hammered linear by what she could not know, less than primitive, was for all its horror, still human. Though bloody handed, he was safer than the precision of the world linguistically corrected. What could you say to a man who could not say I? What could he say to her? Jebel's cruelties, kindnesses, existed in the articulate limits of civilization. But this red bestiality—fascinated her!

She rose from the hammock, this time unsnapping the bandage. She'd felt better nearly an hour, but she had lain still thinking most of the time. The ramp tilted to her feet.

When the infirmary wall solidified behind her, she paused in the corridor. The airflow pulsed like breath. Her translucent slacks brushed the tops of her bare feet. The neckline of her black silk blouse lay loose on her shoulders.

She had rested well into Tarik's night shift. During a period of high activity, the sleeping time was staggered, but when they merely moved from location to location, there were hours when nearly the whole population slept.

Rather than head toward the commons, she turned down an unfamiliar sloping tunnel. White light diffused from the floor, became amber fifty feet on, then amber became orange—she stopped and looked at her hands in the orange light—and forty feet further, the orange light was red. Then: blue.

The space opened around her, the walls slanting back, the ceiling rising into darkness too high to see. The air flickered and blotted with the after-image from the change in color. Insubstantial mist plus her unsettled eyes made her turn to orient herself.

A man was silhouetted against the red entrance to the hall. "Butcher?"

He walked toward her, blue light fogging his features as he neared. He stopped, nodded.

"I decided to take a walk when I felt better," she explained. "What part of the ship is- this?"

"Discorporate quarters."

"I should have known." They fell in step with one another. "Are you just wandering around, too?"

He shook his heavy head. "An alien ship passes close to Tarik and Jebel wants its sensory vectors."

"Alliance or Invader?"

The Butcher shrugged. “Only to know that it is not a human ship."

There were nine species among the seven explored galaxies with interstellar travel. Three had allied themselves definitely with the Alliance. Four had sided with the Invaders. Two were not committed.

They had gone so far into the discorporate sector nothing seemed solid. The walls were blue mist without corners. The echoing crackle of transference energies caused distant lightning, and her eyes were deviled by half-remembered ghosts, who had always passed moments ago, yet were never present,

"How far do we go?" she asked, having decided to walk with him, thinking as she spoke: If he doesn't know the word for I, how can he understand 'we'?

Understanding or not he answered, "Soon," Then he looked directly at her with dark, heavy ridged eyes and asked, "Why?"

The tone of his voice was so different, she knew he was not referring to anything in their exchange during the past few minutes. She cast in her mind for anything she had done that might strike him as perplexing.

He repeated, "Why?"

"Why what. Butcher?"

"Why the saving of Jebel from Cord?"

There was no objection in his question, only ethical curiosity. "Because I like him and because I need him to get me to Headquarters and I would feel sort of funny if I'd let him . . ." She stopped. "Do you know who I am-“

He shook his head.

"Where do you come from Butcher? What planet were you born on?"

He shrugged. "The head," he said, after a moment, "they said there was something wrong with the brain."

"Who?"

"The doctors."

Blue fog drifted between them.

"The doctors on Titin?" she hazarded.

The Butcher nodded.

"Then why didn't they put you in a hospital instead of a prison?"

"The brain is not crazy, they said. This hand"—he held up his left—"kill four people in three days. This hand"—he raised the other—“kill seven. Blow up four buildings with thermite. The foot"—he slapped his left leg—"kicked in the head of the guard at the Telechron Bank. There's a lot of money there, too much to carry. Carry maybe four hundred thousand credits- Not much."

"You robbed the Telechron Bank of four hundred thousand credits!"

"Three days, eleven people, four buildings: all for four hundred thousand credits. But Titin"—his face twisted—"was not fun at all."

"So I'd heard- How long did it take for them to catch you?"

"Six months."

Rydra whistled. “I take my hat off to you, if you could keep out of their hands that long, after a bank robbery. And you know enough biotics to perform a difficult Caesarean section and keep the fetus alive. There's something in that head."

"The doctors say the brain not stupid."

"Look, you and I are going to talk to each other. But first I have to teach"—she stopped—"the brain something."

"What?"

"About you and I. You must hear the words a hundred times a day. Don't you ever wonder what they mean?"

"Why? Most things make sense without them."

"Hey, speak in whatever language you grew up with."

"No."

"Why not? I want to see if it's one I know anything about."

"The doctors say there's something wrong with the brain."

"All right. What did they say was wrong?"

"Aphasia, alexia, amnesia."

"Then you were pretty messed up." She frowned. "Was that before or after the bank robbery?"

"Before."

She tried to order what she had learned.'' Something happened to you that left you with no memory, unable to speak or read, and so the first thing you did was rob the Telechron bank—which Telechron Bank?"

"On Rhea-lV."

"Oh, a small one. But, still—and you stayed free for six months. Any idea what happened to you before you lost your memory?"

The Butcher shrugged.

"I suppose they went through all the possibilities that you were working for somebody else under hypnotics. You don't know what language you spoke before you lost your memory? Well, your speech patterns now must be based on your old language or you would have

learned about I and you just from picking up new words."

"Why must these sounds mean something?"

"Because you asked a question just now that I can't answer if you don't understand them."

“No.'' Discomfort shadowed his voice. “No. There is an answer. The words of the answer must be simpler, that's all."

"Butcher, there are certain ideas which have words for them. If you don't know the words, you can't know the ideas- And if you don't have the idea, you don't have the answer."

"The word you four times, yes? Still nothing unclear, and you mean nothing."

She sighed. "That's because-I was using the word phatically—ritually, without regard for its real meaning . . . as a figure of speech. Look, I asked you a question that you couldn't answer."

The Butcher frowned.

"See, you have to know what they mean to make sense out of what I just said. The best way to learn a language is by listening to it. So listen. When you"— she pointed to him—"said to me," and she pointed to herself. “Knowing what ships to destroy, and ships are destroyed. Now to go down the Dragon's Tongue, Tarik go down the Dragon's Tongue, twice the fist''—she touched his left hand—"banged the chest.'' She raised his hand to his chest. The skin was cool and smooth under her palm. "The fist was trying to tell something. And if you had used the word 'I', you wouldn't have had to use your fist. What you wanted to say was: You knew what ships to destroy and I destroyed the ships. You want to go down the Dragon's Tongue, I will get Tarik down the Dragon'sTongue".' "

The Butcher frowned. "Yes, the fist to tell something."

"Don't you see, sometimes you want to say things, and you're missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That's how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn't exist. And it's something the brain needs to have exist, otherwise you wouldn't have to beat your chest, or strike your fist on your palm. The brain wants it to exist; let me teach it the word."