Babel-17 - Samuel R. Delany

part one

rydra wong

…Here is the hub of ambiguity.

Electric spectra splash across the street.

Equivocation knots the shadowed features

of boys who are not boys;

a quirk of darkness shrivels

a full mouth to senility

or pares it to a razor-edge, pours acid

across an amber cheek, fingers a crotch,

or smashes in the pelvic arch

and wells a dark clot oozing on a chest

dispelled with motion or a flare of light

that swells the lips and dribbles them with blood.

They say the hustlers paint their lips with blood.

They say the same crowd surges up the street

and surges down again, like driftwood borne

tidewise ashore and sucked away with backwash,

only to slap into the sand again,

only to be jerked out and spun away.

Driftwood; the narrow hips, the liquid eyes,

the wideflung shoulders and the rough-cast hands,

the gray-faced jackals kneeling to their prey.

The colors disappear at break of day

when stragglers toward the west riverdocks meet

young sailors ambling shipward on the street…

—from Prism and Lens

1

IT’S A PORT CITY.

Here fumes rust the sky, the General thought. Industrial gases flushed the evening with oranges, salmons, purples with too much red. West, ascending and descending transports, shuttling cargoes to stellarcenters and satellites, lacerated the clouds. It’s a rotten poor city too, thought the General, turning the corner by the garbage-strewn curb.

Since the Invasion six ruinous embargoes for months apiece had strangled this city whose lifeline must pulse with interstellar commerce to survive. Sequestered, how could this city exist? Six times in twenty years he’d asked himself that. Answer? It couldn’t.

Panics, riots, burnings, twice cannibalism—

The General looked from the silhouetted loading-towers that jutted behind the rickety monorail to the grimy buildings. The streets were smaller here, cluttered with Transport workers, loaders, a few stellarmen in green uniforms, and the horde of pale, proper men and women who managed the intricate sprawl of customs operations. They are quiet now, intent on home or work, the General thought. Yet all these people have lived for two decades under the Invasion. They’ve starved during the embargoes, broken windows, looted, run screaming before firehoses, torn flesh from a corpse’s arm with decalcified teeth.

Who is this animal man? He asked himself the abstract question to blur the lines of memory. It was easier, being a general, to ask about the “animal man” than about the woman who had sat in the middle of the sidewalk during the last embargo holding her skeletal baby by one leg, or the three scrawny teenage girls who had attacked him on the street with razors (—she had hissed through brown teeth, the bar of metal glistening toward his chest, “Come here, Beefsteak! Come get me, Lunch meat…” He had used karate—) or the blind man who had walked up the avenue, screaming.

Pale and proper men and women now, who spoke softly, who always hesitated before they let an expression fix their faces, with pale, proper, patriotic ideas: work for victory over the Invaders; Alona Star and Kip Rhyak were great in “Stellar Holliday” but Ronald Quar was the best serious actor around. They listened to Hi Lite’s music (or did they listen, wondered the General, during those slow dances where no one touched). A position in Customs was a good secure job.

Working directly in Transport was probably more exciting and fun to watch in the movies; but really, such strange people—

Those with more intelligence and sophistication discussed Rydra Wong’s poetry.

They spoke of the Invasion often, with some hundred phrases consecrated by twenty years’ repetition on newscasts and in the papers. They referred to the embargoes seldom, and only by the one word.

Take any of them, take any million. Who are they? What do they want? What would they say if given a chance to say anything?

Rydra Wong has become this age’s voice. The General recalled the glib line from a hyperbolic review. Paradoxical: a military leader with a military goal, he was going to meet Rydra Wong now.

The streetlights came on and his image glazed on the plate glass window of the bar. That’s right, I’m not wearing my uniform this evening. He saw a tall, muscular man with the authority of half a century in his craggy face. He was uncomfortable in the gray civilian suit. Till age thirty, the physical impression he had left with people was “big and bumbling.” Afterwards—the change had coincided with the Invasion—it was “massive and authoritarian.”

Had Rydra Wong come to see him at Administrative Alliance Headquarters, he would have felt secure. But he was in civvies, not in stellarman-green. The bar was new to him. And she was the most famous