Babel-17 Read online

Again her answer, both coaxing and witty.

  "Well, yes," he smiled. "For you I guess it wouldn't be."

  Her ease infected him; and either she reached playfully to take his hand or he amazed himself by taking hers, and the apparition as real beneath his fingers with skin as smooth as.

  "You're so forward. I mean I'm not used to young women just coming up and ... behaving like this."

  Her charming logic again explained it away, making him feel her near, nearer, nearing, and her banter made music, a phrase from.

  "Well, yes, you're discorporate, so it doesn't matter. But—"

  And her interruption was a word or a kiss or a frown or a smile, sending not humor through him now, but luminous amazement, fear, excitement; and the feel of her shape against his completely new. He fought to retain it, pattern of pressure and pressure, fading as the pressure itself faded. She was going away. She was laughing like, as though, as if. He stood, losing her laughter, replaced by whirled bewilderment in the tides of his consciousness fading—

  V

  When they returned, Brass called, “Good news. We got who we wanted."

  "Crew's coming along," commented Calli.

  Rydra handed him the three index cards. "They'll report to the ship discorporate two hours before— what's wrong?"

  DaniI D.Appleby reached to take the cards. "I. . . she . . ." and couldn't say anything else.

  "Who?" Rydra asked. The concern on her face was driving away even his remaining memories, and he resented it, memories of, of.

  Calli laughed. "A succubus! While we were gone, he got hustled by a succubus^"

  "Yeah!" from Brass. "Look at him!" Ron laughed, too.

  "It was a woman ... I think. I can remember what I said—"

  "How much did she take you for?" Brass asked.

  "Take me?"

  Ron said, "I don't think he knows."

  Calli grinned at the Navigator-Three and then at the Officer. "Take a look in your billfold."

  "Huh?"

  "Take a look."

  Incredulously he reached in his pocket. The metallic envelope flipped apart in his hands. "Ten . . .twenty . . . But I had fifty in here when I left the cafe!"

  Calli slapped his thighs laughing. He loped over and encircled the Customs Officer's shoulder. "You'll end up a Transport man after that happens a couple of more times."

  "But she... I ..." The emptiness of his thefted recollections was real as any love pain. The rifled wallet seemed trivial. Tears banked his eyes. "But she was—" and confusion snarled the sentence's end.

  "What was she, friend?" Calli asked.

  "She . . . was." That was the sad entirety.

  "Since discor'oration, you can take it with you," said Brass. "They try for it with some 'retty shady methods, too. I'd be embarrassed to tell you how many times that's ha'ened to me."

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

  "No, I ..."

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

  Choking on the embarrassment, he nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "There you go!" Calli laughed.

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

  She raised her brows questioningly.

  "To get a first navigator," he explained.

  "To the Morgue."

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

  "She will be," Rydra said.

  They left the Discorporate Sector and took the monorail through the tortuous remains of Transport Town, then along the edge of the space-field. Blackness beyond the windows was flung with blue signal lights. Ships rose with a white flare, blued through distance, became bloody stars in the rusted air.

  They joked for the first twenty minutes over the humming runners. The fluorescent ceiling dropped greenish light on their faces, in their laps. One by one, the Customs Officer watched them go silent while the side-to-side inertia became a headlong drive. He had not spoken at all, still trying to regain her face, her words, her shape. But it stayed away, frustrating as the imperative comment that leaves your mind as speech begins, and the mouth is left empty, a lost reference to love.

  When they stepped onto the open platform at Thule Station, warm wind flushed from the east. The clouds had shattered under an ivory moon. Gravel and granite silvered the broken edges. Behind was the city's red mist. Before, on broken night, rose the black Morgue.

  They went down the steps and walked quietly through the stone park. The garden of water and rock was eerie in the dark. Nothing grew here.

  At the door slabbed metal without external light blotted the darkness. "How do you get in?" the Officer asked, as they climbed the shallow steps.

  Rydra lifted the Captain's pendant from her neck and placed it against a small disk. Something hummed, and light divided the entrance as the doors slid back. Rydra stepped through, the rest followed.

  Calli stared at the metallic vaults overhead. "You know there's enough transport meat deep-frozen in this place to service a hundred stars and all their planets."

  "And Customs people too," said the Officer.

  "Does anybody ever bother to call back a Customs who decided to take a rest?" Ron asked with candid ingenuousness.

  "Don't know what for," said Calli.

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

  "More rarely than with Transport," Rydra said.

  “As of yet, the Customs work involved in getting ships from star to star is a science. The transport work maneuvering through hyperstasis levels is still an art. In a hundred years they may both be sciences. Fine. But today a person who learns the rules of art well is a little rarer than the person who learns the rules of science. Also, there's a tradition involved. Transport people are used to dying and getting called back, working with dead men or live. This is still a little hard for Customs to take. Over here to the Suicides."

  They left the main lobby for the labeled corridor that sloped up through the storage chamber. It emptied them onto a platform in an indirectly lighted room, racked up its hundred-foot height with glass cases; catwalked and laddered like a spider's den. In the coffins, dark shapes were rigid beneath frost shot glass.

  "What I don't understand about this whole business," the Officer whispered, "is the calling back. Can anybody who dies be made corporate again? You're right. Captain Wong, in Customs it's almost impolite to talk about things like . . . this."

  "Any suicide who discorporates through regular Morgue channels can be called back. But a violent death where the Morgue just retrieves the body afterwards, or the run of the mill senile ending that most of us hit at a hundred and fifty or so, then you're dead forever; although there, if you pass through regular channels, your brain pattern is recorded and your thinking ability can be tapped if anyone wants it, though your consciousness is gone wherever consciousness goe
s."

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

  The Navigators stepped up, puzzled.

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

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

  "Huh? About what?"

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

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

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

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

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

  "But pretty," Ron repeated. "And likes sports, to wrestle, I think, when we're planet side. Cathy wasn't very athletic. I always thought it would have been better, for me, if she was, see. I can talk better to people 1 can wrestle with. Serious though, I mean about working. And quick like Cathy could think. Only . . ."

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

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

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

  ". . , could love us," said Calli.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Hello?"

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

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

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

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

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

  "Ninyi ni nani?" she asked again.

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

  "Well?" said Rydra.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Integrate," Rydra said.

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

  VI

  Dear Mocky,

  When you get this I'll have taken off two hours ago. It's a half hour before dawn and I want to talk to you, but I won't wake you up again.

  I am, nostalgically enough, taking out Fobo's old ship, the Rimbaud (the name was Muels' idea, remember). At least, I'm familiar with it: lots of good memories here. I leave in twenty minutes.

  Present location: I'm sitting in a folding chair in the freight lock looking over the field. The sky is star specked to the west, and gray to the east. Black needles of ships pattern around me. Lines of blue signal lights fade toward the east. It is calm now.

  Subject of my thinking: a hectic night of crew hunting that took me all over Transport Town and out to the Morgue, through dives and glittering byways, etc. Loud and noisy at the beginning, calming to this at the end.

  To get a good pilot you watch him wrestle. A trained captain can tell exactly what sort of a pilot a person will make by observing his reflexes in the arena. Only I am not that well trained.

  Remember, what you said about muscle-reading? Maybe you were righter than you thought. Last night I ran into a kid, a Navigator, who looks like Brancusi's graduation offering, or maybe what Michelangelo wished the human body was. He was born in Transport and knows pilot wrestling inside out, apparently. So I watched him watch my pilot wrestle, and just looking at his quivers and jerks I got a complete analysis of what was going on over my head.

  You know DeFaure's theory that psychic indices have their corresponding muscular tensions (a re-statement of the old Wilhelm Reich hypothesis of muscular armature): I was thinking about it last night. The kid I was telling you about was part of a broken triple, two guys and a girl and the girl got it from the Invaders.

  The boys made me want to cry. But I didn't. Instead I took them to the Morgue and found them a replacement. Weird business. I'm sure they'll think it was magic for the rest of their lives. The basic requirements, however, were all on file: a female Navigator-One who lacks two men. How to adjust the indices? I read Ron's and Calli's from watching them move while they talked. The Corpses are filed under psyche-indices so I just had to feel out when they were congruent. The final choice was a stroke of genius, if I do say so. I had it down to six young ladies who would do. But it needed
to be more precise than that, and I couldn’t play it more precise, at least not by ear. One young lady was from N'gonda Province in Pan Africa. She'd suicided seven years ago. Lost two husbands in an Invasion attack, and returned to earth in the middle of an embargo. You remember what the politics were like then between Pan Africa and Americasia; I was sure she didn't speak English. We woke her, and she didn't. Now, at this point, their indices may be a mite jarring. But, by the time they fight through learning to understand each other—and they will, because they need to—they'll graph out congruent afoot down the logarithmic grid.

  Clever?

  And Babel-17, the real reason for this letter. Told you I had deciphered it enough to know where the next attack will be. The Alliance War Yards at Armsedge.

  Wanted to let you know that's where I'm going, just in case. Talk and talk and talk: what sort of mind can talk like that language talks? And why? Still scared-like a kid at a spelling bee-but having fun. My platoon reported an hour ago. Crazy, lazy lovable kids all. In just a few minutes I'll be going to see my Slug (fat galoof with black eyes. hair, beard; moves slow and thinks fast). You know, Mocky, getting this crew together I was interested in one thing (above competency, and they are all competent): they had to be people I could talk to. And I can.

  Love, Rydra.

  VII

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

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

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

  "I wanted to see you, too."

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