Ron's features fought with each other for an expression. "I just played it back with Slug. It's Captain Wong's—or somebody's—request to Flight Clearance back at the War Yards for take off, and the all clear signal to Slug to get ready to blast."
"I see," Rydra said. She took the spool. Then she frowned, "This reel is from my cabin. I use the three-lobed spools I brought with me from the University. All the other machines on the ship are supplied with four-lobed ones. That tape came from this machine here."
"So," Brass said. "a “arently somebody snuck in and made it when you were out."
"When I'm out, this place is locked so tight a discorporate flea couldn't crawl under the door." She shook her head. "I don't like this. I don't know where I'll be fouled up next. Well"—she stood up—"at least I know what I have to do about Babel-17 now."
"What's that?" Brass asked. Slug had come to the door and was looking over Ron's flowered shoulder.
Rydra looked over the crew. Discomfort or distrust, which was worse? "I really can't tell you now, can I?" she said. "It's that simple." She walked to the door. "I wish I could. But it would be a little silly after this whole business."
"But I would rather speak to Jebel!"
The jester, Klik, ruffled his feathers and shrugged. "Lady, I would honor your desire above all others' on the mountain, save Jebel's himself. And it is Jebel's desire that you now counter. He wishes not to be disturbed. He is plotting Tarik's destination over the next time-cycle. He must judge the currents carefully, and weigh even the weights of the stars about us. It is an arduous task, and—"
"Then where's the Butcher? I'll ask him, but I would prefer to talk directly with—"
The jester pointed with a green talon. "He is in the biology theatre. Go down through the commons and take the first lift to level twelve. It is directly to your left."
"Thank you." She headed toward the gallery steps. At the top of the lift she found the huge iris door, and pressed the entrance disk. Leaves folded back, and she blinked in green light.
His round head and mildly humped shoulders were silhouetted before a bubbling Tarik in which a tiny figure floated: the spray of bubbles that rose about the form deflected on the feet, caught in the crossed curved hands like sparks, frothed the bent head, and foamed in the brush of birthhair that swirled up in the miniature currents.
The Butcher turned, saw her, and said, "It died." He nodded with vigorous belligerence. "It was alive until five minutes ago. Seven and a half months. It should have lived. It was strong enough!" His left fist cracked against his right palm, as she had seen him do before in the commons. Shaking muscles stilled. He thumbed toward an operating table where the Invader's body lay—sectioned. "Badly hurt before she got out. Internal organs messed up. A lot of abdominal necrosis all the way through." He turned his hand so the thumb now pointed over his shoulder to the drifting homunculus, and the gesture that had seemed rough took on an economical grace. "Still—it should have lived."
He switched off the light in the Tarik and the bubbles ceased. He stepped from behind the laboratory table. "What the Lady want?"
"Jebel is planning Tarik's route for the next months. Could you ask him . . ." She stopped. Then she asked, "Why?"
Ron's muscles, she thought, were living cords that snapped and sang out their messages. On this man, muscles were shields to hold the world out, the man in. And something inside was leaping up again and again, striking the shield from behind. The scored belly shifted, the chest contracted over a let breath, the brow smoothed, then creased again.
"Why?" she repeated. "Why did you try to save the child?"
He twisted his face for answer, and his left hand circled the convict's mark on his other bicep as though it had started to sting. Then he gave up with disgust. "Died. No good any more. What the Lady want?"
What leaped and leaped retreated now, and so did she. "I want to know if Jebel will take me to Administrative Alliance Headquarters. I have to deliver some important information concerning the Invasion. My pilot tells me the Specelli Snap runs within ten hyperstatic units, which a spider-boat could make, so Tarik could remain in radio defense space all the way. If Jebel will escort me to Headquarters, I will guarantee him protection and a safe return to the denser part of the Snap."
He eyed her. "All the way down the Dragon's Tongue?"
"Yes. That's what Brass told me the tip of the Snap was called."
"Protection guaranteed?"
"That's right. I'll show you my credentials from General Forester of the Alliance if you . . ."
But he waved for her silence. "Jebel?" He spoke into the wall intercom.
The speaker was directional so she couldn't hear the answer.
"Make Tarik go down the Dragon's Tongue during the first cycle." There was either questioning or objection.
"Go down the Tongue and it'll be good."
He nodded to the unintelligible whisper, then said, "It died," and switched off. "All right. Jebel will take Tarik to Headquarters."
Amazement undercut her initial disbelief. It was an amazement she would have felt before when he responded so unquestioningly to her plan to destroy the Invader's defense, had not Babel-17 precluded such feelings. "Well, thanks," she began, "but you haven't even asked me . . ." Then she decided to phrase the whole thing another way.
But the Butcher made a fist: "Knowing what ships to destroy, and ships are destroyed." He banged his fist against his chest. "Now to go down the Dragon's Tongue, Tarik go down the Dragon's Tongue." He banged his chest again.
She wanted to question, but looked at the dead fetus turning in dark liquid behind him and said instead, "Thank you, Butcher." As she stepped through the iris door, she mulled over what he had said to her, trying to frame some explanation of his actions. Even the rough way in which his words fell—
His words!
It struck her at once, and she hurried down the corridor.
III
"BRASS, he can't say 'I'!" She leaned across the table, surprised curiosity impelling her excitement.
The pilot locked his claws around his drinking horn. The wooden tables across the commons were being set up for the evening meal.
"Me, my, mine, myself. I don't think he can say any of those either. Or think them. I wonder where the hell he's from."
"You know any language where there's no word for—'I'?"
"I can think of a couple where it isn't used often, but no one that doesn't even have the concept, if only hanging around in a verb ending."
"Which all means wha`?"
"A strange man with a strange way of thinking. I don't know why, but he's aligned himself with me, sort of my ally on this trip and a go-between with Jebel, I'd like to understand, so I won't hurt him."
She looked around the commons at the bustle of preparation. The girl who had brought them chicken was glancing at her now, wondering, still afraid, fear melting to curiosity which brought her two tables nearer, then curiosity evaporating to indifference, and she was off for more spoons from the wall drawer.
She wondered what would happen if she translated her perceptions of people's movement and muscle tics into Babel-17. It was not only a language, she understood now, but a flexible matrix of analytical possibilities where the same ‘word' defined the stresses in a webbing of medical bandage, or a defensive grid of spaceships. What would it do with the tensions and yearnings in a human face? Perhaps the flicker of eyelids and fingers would become mathematics, without meaning. Or perhaps— While she thought, her mind changed gears into the headlong compactness of Babel-17. And she swept her eyes around the—voices.
Expanding and defining through one another, not the voices themselves, but the minds making the voices, braiding with one another, so that the man entering the hall now she knew to be the grieving brother of Pigfoot, and the girl who'd served them was in love, so in love with the dead youth from the discorporate sector who tickled and teased her dreams . . .