Babel-17 (24 page)

"They did discover that I was an Alliance weapon. But that hyperstasis transmitter breaks down under certain conditions and flushes out with my body's waste matter. It takes me about three weeks to grow a new one. So they never learned I was in control of the rest. But they had just come up with their secret weapon, Babel-17. They gave me a thorough case of amnesia; left me with no communication facilities save Babel-17, then let me escape from Nueva-nueva York back into Alliance territory- I didn't get any instructions to sabotage you. The powers I had, the contact with the other spies dawned on me very painfully and very slowly. And my whole life as a saboteur masquerading as a criminal just grew up. How, or why, I still don't know."

"I think I can explain that. General," Rydra said. "You can program a computer to make mistakes, and you do it not by crossing wires, but my manipulating the language you teach it to 'think' in. The lack of an 'I' precludes any self-critical process. In fact it cuts out any awareness of the symbolic process at all—which is the way we distinguish between reality and our expression of reality."

"Come again?"

"Chimpanzees," Dr. T'mwarba interrupted, "are quite coordinated enough to learn to drive cars, and smart enough to distinguish between red and green lights. But once they leam, they still can't be turned loose, because when the light goes green, they will drive through a brick wall if it's in front of them, and if the light turns red, they will stop in the middle of an intersection even if a truck is bearing down on top of them. They don't have the symbolic process. For them, red is stop, and green is go."

"Anyway," Rydra went on. "Babel-17 as a language contains a pre-set program for the Butcher to become a criminal and saboteur- If you turn somebody with no memory loose in a foreign country with only the words for tools and machine parts, don't be surprised if he ends up a mechanic. By manipulating his vocabulary properly you could just as easily make him a sailor, or an artist. Also, Babel-17 is such an exact analytical language, it almost assures you technical mastery of any situation you look at. And the lack of an I blinds you to the fact that though it's a highly useful way to look at things, it's the only way."

"But you mean that this language could even turn you against the Alliance?" the General asked.

"Well," said Rydra, "to start off with, the word for Alliance in Babel-17 translates literally into English as: 
one-who-has-invaded. You take it from there. It has all sorts of little diabolisms programmed into it. While thinking in Babel-17 it becomes perfectly logical to try and destroy your own ship and then blot out the fact with self-hypnosis so you won't discover what you're doing and try and stop yourself."

"That's your spy!" Dr. T'mwarba interrupted.

Rydra nodded. "It 'programs' a self-contained schizoid personality into the mind of whoever learns it, reinforced by self-hypnosis—which seems the sensible thing to do since everything else in the language is 'right’, whereas any other tongue seems so clumsy. This 'personality' has the general desire to destroy the Alliance at any cost, and at the same time remain hidden from the rest of the consciousness until it's strong enough to take over. That's what happened to us. Without the Butcher's pre-capture experience, we weren’t strong enough to keep complete control, although we could stop them from doing anything destructive."

"Why didn't they completely dominate you?" Dr. Tmwarba asked.

"They didn't count on my 'talent', Mocky," Rydra said. "I analyzed it with Babel-17 and it's very simple. The human nervous system puts out radio noise. But you'd have to have an antenna of several thousand miles surface area to tune in anything fine enough to make sense out of that noise. In fact the only thing with that sort of area is another human nervous system. It happens to an extent in everybody. A few people like me just happen to have better control of it. The schizoid personalities aren't all that strong, and I've also got some control of the noise I send out- I've just been jamming them."

"And what am I supposed to do with these schizy espionage agents each of you is housing in your head? Lobotomize you?"

“No,” Rydra said. “The way you fix your computer isn't to hack out half the wires. You correct the language, introduce the missing elements and compensate for ambiguities."

"We introduced the main missing elements," the Butcher said, "back in Tarik's graveyard. We're well on the way to the rest."

The General stood up slowly. "It won't do." He shook his head. "Tmwarba, where's that tape?"

"Right in my pocket where it's been all along," Dr. T'mwarba said, pulling out the spool.

"I'm taking this right down to cryptography, then we're going to start all over again." He walked to the door. "Oh, yes, and I'm locking you in." He left, and the three looked at each other.

"... Yes, of course I should have known that somebody who could get halfway through to our maximum security room and sabotage the war effort over one whole arm of the galaxy could escape from my locked office! . . . I am not a nitwit, but I thought—I know you don't care what I think, but they—No, it didn't occur to me that they were going to steal a ship. Well, yes, I—No. Of course I didn't assume—Yes, it was one of our largest battleships. But they left a—No, they're not going to attack our—I have no way of knowing except that they left a note saying—Yes, on my desk, they left a note.. . . Well, of course I'll read it to you. That's what I've been trying to do for the last . . ."

Rydra stepped into the spacious cabin of the battleship Chronos. Ratt was riding her piggyback.

As she lowered him to the floor, the Butcher turned from the control panel. “How's everybody doing down there?"

"Anybody really confused with the new controls?" Rydra asked.

The platoon boy pulled his ear. "I don't know, Captain. This here is a lot of ship for us to run."

"We just have to get back to the Snap and give this ship to Jebel and the others on Tarik - Brass says he can get us there if you kids keep everything moving smooth,"

"We're trying. But there're so many orders all coming through from all over the place at once-I should be down there now."

"You can get down there in a minute," Rydra said. "Suppose I make you honorary quipucamayocuna?"

"Who?"

"That's the guy who reads all the orders as they come through and interprets them and hands them out. Your great grandparents were Indian, weren't they?"

"Yeah. Seminoles."

Rydra shrugged. "Quipucamayocuna is Mayan. Same difference. They gave orders by tying knots in rope, we use punch cards. Scoot, and just keep us flying."

Ratt touched his forehead and scooted. "What do you think the General made of your note?" the Butcher asked her.

"It doesn't really matter. It will make its round of all the top officials; and they'll ponder over it and the possibility will be semantically imprinted in their minds, which is a good bit of the job. And we have Babel-17 corrected—perhaps I should call it Babel-18—which is the best tool conceivable to build it into truth."

“Plus my battery of assistants," the Butcher said. "I think six months should do it. You're lucky those sickness attacks weren't from the speeded up metabolic rates after all. That sounded a little odd to me. You should have collapsed before you came out of Babel-17, if that was the case."

"It was the schiz-configuration trying to force its way into dominance. Well, as soon as we finish with Jebel, we have a message to leave on the desk of Invader Commander Meihiow^t Nueva-nueva York.''

“This war will end within six months,'' she quoted. "Best prose sentence I ever wrote. But now we have to work."

"We have the tools to do it no one else has," the Butcher said. He moved over as she sat beside him. "And with the right tools it shouldn't be too difficult. What are we going to do with our spare time?"

"I'm going to write a poem, I think. But it may be a novel. I have a lot to say."

"But I'm still a criminal. Canceling out bad deeds with good is a linguistic fallacy that's gotten people in trouble more than once. Especially if the good deed is in the offing. I' m still responsible for a lot of murders.''

"The whole mechanism of guilt as a deterrent to right action is just as much a linguistic fault. If it bothers you, go back, get tried, be acquitted, then go on about your business- Let me be your business for a while."

"Sure. But who says I get acquitted at this trial?" Rydra began to laugh. She stooped before him, took his hands, and laid her face against them, still laughing. "But I'll be your defense! And even without Babel-17, you should know by now, I can talk my way out of anything."