The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One Page 6

  “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 head shaking between two names on the screen, “could you love her?”

  The hesitation, the 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 template on the coffin’s base. It rocked a moment, settled, clicked.

  The frost melted all 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 dark, 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?”

  “Ninyi ni nani?” Her face was puzzled. “Nino wapi 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 to get to know each other before you can say anything really foolish. She likes to wrestle, Ron.”

  Ron looked at the young woman in the case. Her graphite-colored hair was natural, her dark lips purpled 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!”

  6

  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 speckled to the west, and gray to the east. Black needles of ships pattern around me. Lines of blue signal lights fade toward the south. It’s 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 De Faure’s theory that psychic indices have their corresponding muscular tensions (a restatement 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 a foot 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.

  7

  LIGHT BUT NO SHADOW. The General stood up 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 the license to conduct this expedition, you would inform me where you—”

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

  “Oh, I see.”

  She smiled. “You’ll have to go shortly. We take off in a few minutes.”

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

  “General Forester, once I wrote a poem I’m reminded of. It was called ‘Advice to Those Who Would Love Poets.’ ”

  The General opened his teeth without separating his lips.

  “It started something like:

  Young man, she will gnaw out your tongue.

  Lady, he will steal your hands…

  You can read the rest. It’s in my second book. If you’re not willing to lose a poet seven times a day, it’s frustrating as hell.”

  He said simply: “You knew I…”

  “I knew and I know. And I’m glad.”

  The lost breath returned and an unfamiliar thing was happening to his face: he smiled. “When I was a private, Miss Wong, and we’d be confined to barracks, we’d talk about girls and girls and girls. And somebody would say about one: she was so pretty she didn’t have to give me any, just promise me some.” He let the stiffness leave his shoulders a moment, and though they actually fell half an inch, the effect was that they seemed broader by two. “That’s what I was feeling.”

  “Thank you for telling me,” she said. “I like you, General. And I promise I’ll still like you the next time I see you.”

  “I…thank you. I guess that’s all. Just thank you…for knowing and promising.” Then he said, “I have to go now, don’t I?”

  “We’ll be taking off in ten minutes.”

  “Your letter,” he said, “I’ll mail it for you.”

  “Thanks.” She handed it to him, he took her hand, and for the slightest moment with the slightest pressure, held her. Then he turned, left. Minutes later she watched his saucer-sled glide across the concrete, its sun-side flaring suddenly as light blistered the east.

  part two

  ver dorco

  If words are paramount I am afraid that

  words are all my hands have ever seen…

  —from Quartet

  1

  THE RETRANSCRIBED MATERIAL PASSED on the sorting screen. By the computer console lay 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….

  Possible Phonetic Structure…

  Semiotic, Semantic, and Syntactic Ambiguities…

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

  “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 platoon cook was a boy of seventeen. Two cosmetisurgical 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 liquified 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 toward the hatch. Rydra laughed and turned back to the console.

  “Macon 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 cuaderno slammed against 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 damned kids have…” She clicked them on.

  Flip, the platoon 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, what 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 in momentum from the last stiff wind from Earth’s magnosphere.”

  “What’s it look like, Eyes?”

  “Inside of a coal shuttle. 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 jum’ing 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 from the ruptured chair 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 ha’’ened, ha’’ened inside the shi’.”

  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 hy’erstasis 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 ’orthole and an old-fashioned sextant could set 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, il cerchio.” She put her palms flat on the table-top and pressed. “Circles,” she said. “Circles in different languages!”