With his free hand, the Butcher caught his fingers in Cord's black hair. Then, not particularly quickly, he pushed the knife to the hilt into Cord's right eye, handle first.
The scream became a gurgle. The flailing hands fell from the Butcher's shoulders. Those sitting close stood.
Rydra's heart banged twice to break her ribs. "But you didn't even check. . . . Suppose I was wrong . . . Maybe there was more to it than . . ." Her tongue wagged through the meaningless protests. And maybe her heart had stopped.
The Butcher, both hands bloody, looked at her coldly. "He moved with a knife on Tarik toward Jebel or Lady and he dies." Right fist ground on left palm, now soundless with red lubricant.
"Miss Wong," Jebel said, "from what I've seen, there's little doubt in my mind that Cord was certainly dangerous. I'm sure there's not much in yours, either. You are highly useful. I am highly obliged. I hope this trip down the Dragon's Tongue proves propitious. The Butcher had just told me it was at your request that we are going."
"Thank you, but . . ." Her heart was pounding again. She tried to form some clause to hang from the hook of 'but' still hesitant in her mouth. Instead she got very sick, pitched forward, half blind. The Butcher caught her on red palms.
The round, warm, blue room again. But alone, and she was at last able to think about what had happened in the commons. It was not what she'd repeatedly tried to describe to Mocky. It was what Mocky had repeatedly insisted to her: telepathy. But apparently, telepathy was the nexus of old talent and a new way of thinking. It opened worlds of perception, of action. Then why was she sick? She recalled how time slowed when her mind worked under Babel-17, how her mental processes speeded up. If there was a corresponding increase in her physiological functions, her body might not be up to the strain.
The tapes from the Rimbaud had told her the next 'sabotage' attempt would be at Administrative Alliance Headquarters. She wanted to get there with the language, the vocabulary and grammar, give it to them, and retire. She was almost ready to hand over the search for this mysterious speaker. But no, not quite, there was still something, something to be heard and spoken . . .
Sick and falling, she snagged on bloody fingers, woke starting. The Butcher's egoless brutality, hammered linear by what she could not know, less than primitive, was for all its horror, still human. Though bloody handed, he was safer than the precision of the world linguistically corrected. What could you say to a man who could not say I? What could he say to her? Jebel's cruelties, kindnesses, existed in the articulate limits of civilization. But this red bestiality—fascinated her!
IV
SHE ROSE FROM the hammock, this time unsnapping the bandage. She'd felt better nearly an hour, but she had lain still thinking most of the time. The ramp tilted to her feet.
When the infirmary wall solidified behind her, she paused in the corridor. The airflow pulsed like breath. Her translucent slacks brushed the tops of her bare feet. The neckline of her black silk blouse lay loose on her shoulders.
She had rested well into Tarik's night shift. During a period of high activity, the sleeping time was staggered, but when they merely moved from location to location, there were hours when nearly the whole population slept.
Rather than head toward the commons, she turned down an unfamiliar sloping tunnel. White light diffused from the floor, became amber fifty feet on, then amber became orange—she stopped and looked at her hands in the orange light—and forty feet further, the orange light was red. Then: blue.
The space opened around her, the walls slanting back, the ceiling rising into darkness too high to see. The air flickered and blotted with the after-image from the change in color. Insubstantial mist plus her unsettled eyes made her turn to orient herself.
A man was silhouetted against the red entrance to the hall. "Butcher?"
He walked toward her, blue light fogging his features as he neared. He stopped, nodded.
"I decided to take a walk when I felt better," she explained. "What part of the ship is—this?"
"Discorporate quarters."
"I should have known." They fell in step with one another. "Are you just wandering around, too?"
He shook his heavy head. "An alien ship passes close to Tarik and Jebel wants its sensory vectors."
"Alliance or Invader?"
The Butcher shrugged. “Only to know that it is not a human ship."
There were nine species among the seven explored galaxies with interstellar travel. Three had allied themselves definitely with the Alliance. Four had sided with the Invaders. Two were not committed.
They had gone so far into the discorporate sector nothing seemed solid. The walls were blue mist without corners. The echoing crackle of transference energies caused distant lightning, and her eyes were deviled by half-remembered ghosts, who had always passed moments ago, yet were never present.
"How far do we go?" she asked, having decided to walk with him, thinking as she spoke: If he doesn't know the word for I, how can he understand 'we'?
Understanding or not he answered, "Soon," Then he looked directly at her with dark, heavy ridged eyes and asked, "Why?"
The tone of his voice was so different, she knew he was not referring to anything in their exchange during the past few minutes. She cast in her mind for anything she had done that might strike him as perplexing.
He repeated, "Why?"
"Why what. Butcher?"
"Why the saving of Jebel from Cord?"
There was no objection in his question, only ethical curiosity. "Because I like him and because I need him to get me to Headquarters and I would feel sort of funny if I'd let him . . ." She stopped. "Do you know who I am—"
He shook his head.
"Where do you come from Butcher? What planet were you born on?"
He shrugged. "The head," he said, after a moment, "they said there was something wrong with the brain."
"Who?"
"The doctors."
Blue fog drifted between them.
"The doctors on Titin?" she hazarded.
The Butcher nodded.
"Then why didn't they put you in a hospital instead of a prison?"
"The brain is not crazy, they said. This hand"—he held up his left—"kill four people in three days. This hand"—he raised the other—“kill seven. Blow up four buildings with thermite. The foot"—he slapped his left leg—"kicked in the head of the guard at the Telechron Bank. There's a lot of money there, too much to carry. Carry maybe four hundred thousand credits. Not much."
"You robbed the Telechron Bank of four hundred thousand credits!"
"Three days, eleven people, four buildings: all for four hundred thousand credits. But Titin"—his face twisted—"was not fun at all."
"So I'd heard. How long did it take for them to catch you?"
"Six months."
Rydra whistled. “I take my hat off to you, if you could keep out of their hands that long, after a bank robbery. And you know enough biotics to perform a difficult Caesarean section and keep the fetus alive. There's something in that head."
"The doctors say the brain not stupid."
"Look, you and I are going to talk to each other. But first I have to teach"—she stopped—"the brain something."
"What?"
"About you and I. You must hear the words a hundred times a day. Don't you ever wonder what they mean?"
"Why? Most things make sense without them."