Babel-17 Part 1 Chapters 4-6: Ghostly Dreams and Getting Ready to Fly

Three chapters this time, because Delany keeps them short and punchy here. Chapter IV is barely two pages. But those two pages are some of the strangest writing in the book so far.

Chapter IV: The Succubus

While Rydra and the crew are off finding their Eye, Ear, and Nose in the Discorporate Sector, the Customs Officer is left alone. And something happens to him.

A woman approaches him. Or the ghost of a woman. Or something. He talks to her. She is witty. She is charming. She reaches for his hand, or maybe he reaches for hers. She feels real under his fingers, skin as smooth as… and that is where his memory cuts off.

Here is the thing about how Delany writes this chapter. It is all fragments. Broken sentences. Half-finished thoughts. “Her hair holding the recalled odor of.” Of what? We never find out. “Her shape against his completely new. He fought to retain it, pattern of pressure and pressure, fading.”

The woman is a succubus, a discorporate spirit who seduces living people. And when she leaves, she takes not just thirty dollars from his wallet but his actual memories of her. He cannot remember her face. He cannot finish any sentence about her. All he has is the feeling of loss.

“She… was.” That is the sad entirety of what he can say about her.

I have to admit, this chapter hit me harder than I expected. Delany captures something very real about loss here. Not just the big dramatic kind of loss, but the small, everyday way that beautiful moments slip through your fingers. You know something happened. You know it mattered. But the details are gone, and all you are left with is the shape of the absence.

The crew comes back and finds the Officer standing there, dazed. They laugh. “A succubus! While we were gone, he got hustled by a succubus!” But the Officer is almost crying. The rifled wallet feels trivial next to the stolen memories.

Brass is sympathetic. “Since discorporation, you can take it with you. They try for it with some pretty shady methods too. I’d be embarrassed to tell you how many times that’s happened to me.”

It is a small, weird, beautiful chapter. Two pages and it says more about loneliness and desire than some entire novels manage.

Chapter V: The Morgue

Now the crew needs one more person. A Navigator-One to complete Calli and Ron’s broken triple.

And Rydra takes them to the Morgue. Which is exactly what it sounds like. A massive building full of frozen dead bodies. Hundreds of thousands of glass coffins racked up a hundred feet high, connected by catwalks and ladders like a spider web.

But not all dead people are the same in this world. There are three categories:

1. Suicides who went through proper Morgue channels. They can be fully brought back to life.
2. Violent deaths where the Morgue just retrieves the body. Dead forever, but their brain patterns get recorded and their thinking ability can be accessed.
3. Natural deaths from old age around 150. Same deal as violent deaths. Gone, but their knowledge remains available.

Rydra is looking specifically in the Suicide section. She needs a living Navigator-One, not a discorporate ghost.

And here is where Rydra’s people-reading ability really shines. She stands at a filing crystal and asks Calli and Ron to talk about what they want in a new partner. Not just professional skills, but personal stuff too.

Ron says he wants her to be pretty. And athletic. “I can talk better to people I can wrestle with.”

Calli starts describing Cathy, their dead Navigator-One, and then catches himself. “She’s got to be a whole person, a new person, not somebody who is half what we remember about somebody else.”

While they talk, Rydra reads their body language and filters through the filing system. She is matching their psychological profiles to the dead navigators on file. She narrows it down to six candidates, but needs more precision than she can get from just reading them.

So she makes a brilliant choice. She picks Mollya Twa, a woman from N’gonda Province in Pan Africa who does not speak English.

They open the coffin. The frost melts. A dark-skinned woman with short graphite hair and purple lips opens terrified eyes.

“Ninyi ni nani?” she asks. Who are you?

Calli and Ron are confused. “I don’t think she speaks English,” Ron says.

And Rydra grins. “But other than that she’s perfect. This way you’ll have time to get to know each other before you can say something really foolish.”

This is genius. The psychological indices might be slightly off at first. But by the time Calli and Ron work through the challenge of learning to communicate with Mollya, they will have built a real relationship. Not one based on how much she reminds them of Cathy, but something entirely new.

The language theme shows up again. Communication is not just about words. It is about the effort of reaching toward another person. And sometimes the barriers to communication are actually what make the connection stronger.

Chapter VI: Rydra’s Letter

This chapter is written as a letter from Rydra to someone named “Mocky.” It is dawn. She is sitting in a folding chair in the freight lock of her ship, the Rimbaud, watching the sky lighten before takeoff.

The letter format gives us something we have not gotten before. Rydra’s inner voice. Her private thoughts. And she is smart, funny, and a little scared.

She explains how she chose the crew. How she watched Ron’s body react while Brass wrestled and read his entire analysis from muscle twitches. She calls her choice of Mollya “a stroke of genius, if I do say so.” She is proud of herself and not shy about it.

And then the key information drops. She has decoded enough of Babel-17 to know where the next attack will happen. The Alliance War Yards at Armsedge. That is where she is heading.

“Talk and talk and talk,” she writes. “What sort of mind can talk like that language talks? And why?”

She is still scared. But also having fun. “Scared like a kid at a spelling bee, but having fun.”

The letter tells us one more important thing. When picking her crew, competency mattered, but what she really cared about was this: “They had to be people I could talk to. And I can.”

For a poet and linguist, communication is everything. Not just understanding Babel-17 as a puzzle, but being surrounded by people she can genuinely connect with. Language and connection are the same thing for Rydra.

Wrapping Up These Three Chapters

Chapters IV through VI are transition chapters. The action of building the crew in Chapter III gives way to reflection. The succubus scene is dreamlike and sad. The Morgue scene is eerie but ends with hope. And Rydra’s letter grounds everything in her perspective before the real journey begins.

Delany packs a lot of world-building into small spaces here. The rules of discorporation. The psychology of triples. The economics of transport work. But he never dumps information on you. It all comes out through dialogue and action, through characters arguing and joking and grieving.

Next up, the ship takes off. Part One of Babel-17 is almost over.

This is post 5 of 19 in the Babel-17 retelling series.

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