That she was sitting in the great commons while men and women filed infer the evening meal was a very small part of her consciousness.
. . . turning about the general hunger, a belly-beast with teeth in one man, a lazy pool in another, now the familiar rush of adolescent confusion as the Rimbaud's platoon came pummeling in, driven by the deep concern of Slug, and further over amidst ebullience, hunger, and love, and fear! It gonged in the hall, flashed red in the indigo tide, and she searched for Jebel or the Butcher because their names were in the fear, but found neither in the room; instead, a thin man named Geoffry Cord in whose brain crossed wires sparked and sputtered Make death with the knife I have sheathed to my leg, and again With my tongue make me a place in an eyrie high on Tarik, and the minds about him, groping and hungering, mumbling over humor and hurt, loving a little and groping for more, all crosshatched with relaxation one way at the coming meal, and in others anticipation at what clever Klik would present that evening, the minds of the actors of the pantomime keyed to performance while they perused the spectators whom, at an earlier hour, they had worked and slept with, one elderly navigator with a geometrical head hurrying to give the girl, who was to play in the play at being in love, a silver clasp he had melted and scribed himself to see if she would play at loving him . . .
They set her place, brought first a flagon, and then bread, which she saw and smiled at, but was seeing so much else; around her people were sitting, relaxing, while the serving people hurried to the food counter where the roasts and fried fruit steamed.
. . . yet through all this her mind circled back to the alarm of Geoffry Cord, I must act this evening as the actors close, and unable to focus on anything but his urgency, she watched him roil and ravel through his plotting, to hurry forward when the pantomime began as if he wanted to get a closer look as many would do, slip beside the table where Jebel would be sitting, then blade between Jebel’s ribs with his serpent fang, grooved metal which ran with paralytic poison, then chomp down on his hollow tooth that was filled with hypnotic drugs so that when he was taken prisoner they would think he was under somebody else's control, and at last he would release a wild story, implanted below the level of the hypnotics by many painful hours under the personafix, that he was under the Butcher's control; then somehow he would contrive to be alone with the Butcher and bite the Butcher's hand or wrist or leg, injecting the same hypnotic drugs that poisoned his own mouth and rend the hulking convict helpless, and he would control him, and when the Butcher ultimately became Tarik's ruler after the assassination, Geoffry Cord would become the Butcher's lieutenant, as the Butcher was now Jebel's, and when Jebel's Tarik was the Butcher's Tarik, Geoffry would control the Butcher the same way he suspected the Butcher controlled Jebel, and there would be a reign of harshness and all strangers expelled from the berg to death by vacuum, and they would fall mightily on all ships. Invader, Alliance, or Shadow in the Snap, and Rydra tore her mind from his and swept the brief surface of Jebel and the Butcher, and saw no hypnotics, but also that they suspected no treachery and her own delayed fear, taking her from what she felt in her slipping and lapping with doubled and halved voice . . . (her fear broke from her vast wordview, while she felt schismic rages of him and still would survive it and found his fear as porous, porous as a sponge) and no yes, she was able, even as she walked to pick the words and images that would drive and push him to his betrayal . . . (and no yes, once struck by his fear and rebounding, she brought herself back) . . . to a single line that scribed through both perception and action, speech and communication, both one now, picking down sounds that would persuade with the deliberation this lengthened time lent . . .
She saw so much more than the little demonic jester on the stage saying, "Before our evening's entertainment I wish to ask our guest, Captain Wong, if she would speak some few words or perhaps recite for us." And she knew with a very small part of her mind—but it took no more—that she must use this chance to denounce him. The realization momentarily blotted out everything else, but then returned of its proper size, for she knew she could not let Cord stop her from getting to Headquarters, so she stood up and walked to the stage at the end of the commons, picking from Cord's mind as she walked a deadly blade so quickly honed to fit into the cracks of Geoffry Cord. . .
. . . and she reached the platform beside the gorgeous beast, Klik, and mounted, hearing the voices that sang in the hall's silence, and tossed her words now from the sling of her vibrant voice, so that they hung outside her, and she watched them and watched his watching; the rhythm which was barely intricate to most ears in the commons was to him painful because it was timed to the processes of his body, to jar and strike against them . . .
"All right. Cord,
to be lord of this black barrick
Tarik, 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.