"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—
PART THREE
JEBEL TARIK
Real, grimy and exiled, he eludes us.
I would show him books and bridges.
I would make a language we could alt speak.
No blond fantasy Mother has sent to plague us in the Spring, he has his own bad dreams, needs work.
Gets drunk, maybe would not have chosen to be beautiful . . .
. . .You have imposed upon me a treaty of silence . . .
I
ABSTRACT THOUGHTS in a blue room; Nominative, genitive, etative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, illative, instructive, abessive, adessive, inessive, essive, allative, translative, comitative. Sixteen cases of the Finnish noun. Odd, some languages get by with only singular and plural. The American Indian languages even failed to distinguish number. Except Sioux, in which there was a plural only for animate objects. The blue room was round and warm and smooth. No way to say warm in French. There was only hot and tepid If there's no word for it, how do you think about it? And, if there isn't the proper form, you don't have the how even if you have the words. Imagine, in Spanish having to assign a sex to every object: dog, table, tree, can-opener. Imagine, in Hungarian, not being able to assign a sex to anything: he, she, it all the same word. Thou art my friend, but you are my king; thus the distinctions of Elizabeth the First's English. But with some oriental languages, which all but dispense with gender and number, you are my friend, you are my parent, and YOU are my priest, and YOU are my king, and YOU are my servant, and YOU are my servant whom I'm going to fire tomorrow if YOU don't watch it, and YOU are my king whose policies I totally disagree with and have sawdust in YOUR head instead of brains, YOUR highness, and YOU may be my friend, but I'm still gonna smack YOU up side the head if YOU ever say that to me again;.
And who the hell are you anyway . . . ?
What's your name? She thought in a round warm blue room.
Thoughts without a name in a blue room: Ursula, Priscilia, Barbara, Mary, Mona, and Natica: respectively, Bear, Old Lady, Chatterbox, Bitter, Monkey, and Buttock. Name. Names? What's in a name? What name am I in? In my father's father's land, his name would come first, Wong Rydra. In Mollya's home, I would not bear my father's name at all, but my mother's. Words are names for things. In Plato's time things were names for ideas—what better description of the Platonic Ideal? But were words names for things, or was that just a bit of semantic confusion? Words were symbols for whole categories of things, where a name was put to a single object: a name on something that requires a symbol jars, making humor. A symbol on something that takes a name jars, too: a memory that contained a torn window shade, his liquored breath, her outrage, and crumpled clothing wedged behind a chipped, cheap night table. "All right, woman, come here!" and she had whispered, with her hands achingly tight on the brass bar, "My name is Rydra!" An individual, a thing apart from its environment, and apart from all things in that environment; an individual was a type of thing for which symbols were inadequate, and so names were invented. I am invented. I am not a round warm blue room. I am someone in that room, I am—
Her lids had been half-closed on her eyeballs. She opened them and came up suddenly against a restraining web. It knocked her breath out, and she fell back, turning about to look at the room.