Free Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany Page A

asked.
    "Like this." He took the plate in both hands and made a bending gesture.
    "Sure it didn't crack by itself?"
    "It can't," Carlos said. "When it's in place, it's supported too well. You couldn't crack it with a sledge hammer. This panel carries all the communication circuits."
    Rydra nodded.
    "The gyroscopic field deflectors for all our regular space maneuvering . . ." He opened another door and took out another panel. "Here."
    Rydra ran her fingernail along the crack in the second plate. "Someone in the ship broke these," she said. "Take them to the shop. Tell Lizzy when she finishes reprinting them to bring them to me and I'll put them in. I'll give her the marbles back then."

II
    Drop a gem in thick oil. The brilliance yellows slowly, ambers, goes red at last, dies. That was the leap into hyperstatic space.
    At the computer console, Rydra pondered the charts. The dictionary had doubled since the trip began. Satisfaction filled one side of her mind like a good meal.
    Words, and their easy pattering, facile always on her tongue, in her fingers, ordered themselves for her, revealing, defining, and revealing.
    And there was a traitor. The question, a vacuum where no information would come to answer who or what or why, made an emptiness on the other side other brain, agonizing to collapse. Someone had deliberately broken those plates. Lizzy said so, too. What words for this? The names of the entire crew, and by each, a question mark.
    Fling a jewel into a glut of jewels. This is the leap out of hyperstasis into the area of the Alliance War Yards at Armsedge.
    At the communication board, she put on the Sensory Helmet. "Do you want to translate for me?"
    The indicator light blinked acceptance - Each discorporate observer perceived the details of the gravitational and electro-magnetic flux of the stasis currents for a certain frequency with all his senses, each in his separate range. Those details were myriad, and the
    pilot sailed the ship through those currents as sailing ships winded the liquid ocean. But the helmet made a condensation that the captain could view for a general  survey of the matrix, reduced to terms that would leave the corporate viewer sane.
    She opened the helmet, covering her eyes, ears, and nose.
    Flung through loops of blue and wrung with indigo drifted the complex of stations and planetoids making up the War Yards. A musical hum punctuated with bursts of static sounded over the earphones. The olfactory emitters gave a confused odor of perfumes and hot oil charged with the bitter smell of burning citrus peel. With three of her senses filled, she was loosed from the reality of the cabin to drift through sensory abstractions. It took nearly a minute to collect her sensations, to begin their interpretation.
    "All right. What am I looking at?"
    "The lights are the various planetoids and ring stations that make up the War Yards," the Eye explained to her. "That bluish color to the left is a radar net they have spread out toward Stellarcenter Forty-two. Those red flashes in the upper right hand comer are just a
    reflection of Bellatrix from a half-glazed solar-disk rotating four degrees outside your field of vision."
    "What's that low humming?" Rydra asked.
    “The ship's drive,'' the Ear explained. “Just ignore it. I'll block it out if you want."
    Rydra nodded, and the hum ceased.
    "That clicking—" the Ear began.
    "—is morse code," Rydra finished. "I recognize that. It must be two radio amateurs that went to keep off the visual circuits."
    "That's right," the Ear confirmed.
    "What stinks like that?"
    "The overall smell is just Betlatrix's gravitational field. You can't receive the olfactory sensations in stereo, but the burnt lemon peel is the power plant that's located in that green glare right ahead of you."
    "Where do we dock?"
    "In the sound of the E-minor triad."
    ''In the hot oil you can smell bubbling to your left.'”
    "Home in on that white circle."
    Rydra switched to the pilot. "O.K.,