Samuel R Delany - Babel-17

The retranscribed material passed on the sorting screen. By the computer console laid 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...

Probable Phonetic Structure...

Siotic, Semantic, and Syntactic Ambiguities...

The last contained the problems to be solved. The questions, formulated and answered, were transferred as certainties of 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 cook was a boy of seventeen. Two cosmetic surgical 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 liquefied 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 up toward the hatch. Rydra laughed and turned back to the console.

"Reisling 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 cuardemo slammed against the ceiling. She would have, too, had she not grabbed 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 damn kids have..." She clicked them on.

Flop, the 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, that 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 on momentum from the last stiff wind from Earth's mango sphere."

"What's it look like. Eyes?"

"Inside of a coal scuttle. 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 jumping 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 collected in one comer. 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 happened, happened inside the ship."

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 hyperstasis instruments are good," he re minded 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 hyerstasis with the regular communicator shorted. I asked the Navigators to see if they could imrovise 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 'orthote and an old-fashioned sextant could get 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, Ucerchio." She put her palms flat on the tabletop and pressed. "Circles," she said. "Circles in different languages!"

Brass' confusion was terrifying through his fangs. The glinting fleece above his eyes bristled.

"Sphere," she said, "il gtobo, gumlas." She stood up. "Kule, kuglet, kring!"

"Does it matter what language it's in? A circle is a cir''

But she was laughing, running from the dining room.

In her cabin she grabbed up her translation. Her eyes fled down the pages. She banged the button for the Navigators. Ron, wiping whipped-cream from his mouth, said, "Yes, Captain? What do you want?"

"A watch," said Rydra, "and abag of marbles!"

"Huh?" asked Calli.

"You can finish your shortcake later. Meet me in G-center right now."

"Mar-bles?" articulated Mollya wonderingly. "Marbles?"

"One of the kids in the platoon must have brought along a bag of marbles. Get it and meet me in G-center."

She jumped over the ruined skin of the bubble seat and leapt up the hatchway, turned off at the radial shaft seven, and launched down the cylindrical corridor toward the hollow spherical chamber of G-center. The calculated center of gravity of the ship, it was a chamber thirty feet in diameter in constant free fall where certain gravity-sensitive instruments took their readings. A moment later the three Navigators appeared through the diametric entrance- Ron held up a mesh bag of glass balls. "Lizzy asks you to try and get these back to her by tomorrow afternoon because she's been challenged by the kids in Drive and she wants to keep her championship."