Babel-17 Part 1 Chapter 2: How Rydra Wong Picked Her Spaceship Crew

Chapter 2 doesn’t start with a spaceship. It starts with a phone call in the middle of the night. Rydra is scared. And when Rydra Wong is scared, she calls the one person who’s known her since she was a broken twelve-year-old: Dr. Markus T’mwarba.

Mocky

Dr. T’mwarba, or “Mocky” as Rydra calls him, is her psychiatrist. But that word doesn’t capture it. He’s more like a surrogate father. He took her in for neuro-therapy after she lost both parents during the second embargo on Uranus. She was malnourished. She’d survived something called neuro-sciatic plague. She was practically a corpse when they sent her to him.

Now he’s a wealthy, worldly man who lives in a fancy apartment with bubble chairs, gold quilts, fur rugs, and a sideboard that slides out coffee and liquor at a wave of his hand. When Rydra calls at midnight, panicked and stuttering, he tells her to come up and have some coffee. No drama. No panic of his own. Just “drink your coffee” and “stop stuttering, you got over that when you were fifteen.”

I like Mocky a lot. He’s the kind of character who grounds the whole story. While Rydra is brilliant and intense, Mocky is calm and practical. He knows she’s extraordinary, but he doesn’t treat her like a celebrity. He treats her like the kid who once had a panic attack over a talking bird.

The Myna Bird Story

And speaking of that bird. Delany gives us a flashback here that tells you everything you need to know about Rydra Wong.

When she was thirteen and recovering under Mocky’s care, he trained a myna bird to say “Hello, Rydra. It’s a fine day out and I’m happy.” He thought she’d be delighted. Instead she had a full-blown anxiety attack. Screaming, falling, flailing. The bird terrified her.

Why? Something about language coming from a source she couldn’t read. A bird doesn’t have body language she can interpret. It doesn’t have thoughts behind its words. The words are just sounds. Empty. And for someone who reads people the way Rydra does, that’s deeply wrong.

But then the bird got loose a few days later and got tangled in an antenna. It was going to die. And even though Rydra was terrified of the thing, she climbed a tree, reached past live wires shooting sparks, grabbed the bird, and brought it down. Her face was white as lime. Her lips were trembling. She held it at arm’s length and said, “Take it, Mocky, before it says something and I start hollering again.”

That’s Rydra. She is afraid, but she acts anyway. Delany doesn’t give us a fearless hero. He gives us someone who feels fear intensely and does the thing regardless.

Rydra’s Gift (Or Curse)

So why is Rydra calling Mocky at midnight? Because of what happened with General Forester at the bar.

She tells Mocky she knew what the General was thinking. Not telepathy, she insists. Something else. She read him. His body language. The micro-expressions. The way he raised his head instead of shaking it. The pause in the middle of a gesture.

She gives Mocky a specific example. The General was about to shake his head (meaning “it’s not that simple”), but he caught himself and raised his head instead. Because the “not that simple” was connected to Rydra being there. And there was a pause halfway through the raise.

From all this, Rydra reconstructed his exact thought: “If it were that simple, if only it were that simple, we wouldn’t have called you in about it.”

And then she said that thought out loud to him. Word for word. Which made the General think for a second that she could read minds.

Mocky calls it muscle-reading. And he admits it can be accurate. But this is “too exact.” There’s something more going on.

Here’s the thing that upset Rydra, though. It’s not that she could read the General. It’s that when he left, his final thought was: “She doesn’t know. I haven’t communicated a thing to her.”

She could see everything inside him. All his feelings, his admiration, his attraction. But he walked away thinking none of it had gotten through. And Rydra was furious. Not at him. At the gap. At all the misunderstandings that keep people apart. She wanted to untangle them, explain them, fix them. But she couldn’t find the words.

This is the emotional engine of the whole book, by the way. Communication. The tragedy of knowing what someone means but not being able to bridge the gap.

The Poet Who Speaks for Others

There’s a beautiful moment where Rydra talks about her poetry. She says she doesn’t write her own thoughts. She listens to other people, their “half thoughts and half sentences and clumsy feelings,” and it hurts her. So she goes home and polishes it all up and makes it into poems. She says what they can’t.

Mocky quotes the old line about her being “the voice of her age.” Rydra responds with something unprintable.

Because she’s realized something. Up until a year ago, she was just repeating other people’s ideas in beautiful packaging. Now she has things to say that are truly her own. New ideas, not just originals spins on old ones. And she’s terrified.

“It’s easy to repeat; it’s hard to speak, Mocky.”

That line hit me. It’s true for writing. It’s true for life. And it connects directly to Babel-17. A language that forces you to think in entirely new ways. What could be more frightening?

The Plan

Then Rydra drops the bomb. She’s going to solve the Babel-17 mystery herself. Not from a lab. Not from a desk. She’s going to get a spaceship, assemble a crew, and go to the location of the next sabotage attack.

How does she know where the next attack will be? Because she’s already partially understanding Babel-17. From just ten pages of garbled text and the General’s revelation that it’s a dialogue (not a monologue), she’s started to crack it.

Mocky asks the practical questions. Can she handle managing a crew? She has Interstellar Captain’s papers (from a previous “odd marriage,” which Delany hints at but doesn’t explain yet). She grew up as Transport before she became Customs. She knows the world of spacefaring people.

Can she afford it? The government will pay.

Is she stable enough? Mocky clearly has concerns. But he knows Rydra. He watched her climb that tree to save a bird that terrified her.

His answer is basically: “If I said you needed a week of rest and evaluation, what would you do?”

“I’d say thanks. And leave tomorrow.”

He grins. “Then why are you bothering me?”

“Because tomorrow I’m going to be busy as the devil, and I won’t have time to say good-bye.”

The Language That Scares Her

But there’s something else. Before she leaves, Rydra tells Mocky that it’s not just the mystery that scares her. It’s the language itself.

She describes it as “small, tight, close together.” Compact. Efficient. Mocky says compactness sounds like a good quality for a language. But Rydra shakes her head.

“When you learn another tongue, you learn the way another people see the world, the universe,” she tells him.

And as she sees into this language, she begins to “see too much.”

She doesn’t explain further. We don’t get details yet. But the seed is planted. Babel-17 is not just a puzzle to solve. It’s something that changes you as you learn it. The language itself is dangerous.

My Take

Chapter 2 is basically two people talking in a fancy apartment at midnight. No action. No explosions. No space battles. And it’s one of the best chapters in the book.

Delany uses this conversation to do three things at once. First, he deepens Rydra as a character. She’s not just a genius linguist. She’s someone who reads people at an almost impossible level, who feels the pain of miscommunication, who writes poetry to heal a wound she can barely name.

Second, he introduces the Sapir-Whorf concept without ever naming it. The idea that language shapes thought comes through naturally in how Rydra talks about her work and about Babel-17.

Third, he sets up the adventure. Rydra is going into space. She’s going to find who speaks this language. And she’s scared of what she’ll find.

I also want to point out how progressive this book is for 1966. Rydra is a mixed-race woman (her appearance is described as “Oriental”) who is the undisputed star of the story. She’s brilliant, flawed, brave, and complex. The men around her, the General, Mocky, are in awe of her but they don’t control her. She makes her own decisions. She’s going to get a ship and go, and nobody is going to stop her.

Next time: Rydra goes to find crew members for her ship. And the people she finds are… not what you’d expect.

This is post 3 of 19 in the Babel-17 retelling series.

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