Babel-17 Part 2, Chapter 1: Welcome to Ver Dorco, Where Things Start Breaking

Part 2 of Babel-17 starts and the title is “Ver Dorco.” We don’t know what that means yet. But we do get an epigraph from Rydra’s own poetry about words being all her hands have ever seen. Nice touch, Delany.

So here’s what happened. Rydra is deep in her work. She’s at the computer console on the ship, surrounded by charts and notes. She’s got pages of definitions, a notebook full of grammar guesses, and three big charts on the wall. Phonemic structure. Phonetic structure. And a list of all the problems she still needs to solve.

She is cracking Babel-17 one piece at a time.

Dinner Plans and Disaster

Then Diavalo, the seventeen-year-old cook with cosmetic horns and a tail (yes, really), hangs upside down from the hatch to ask about dinner. This little exchange is pure fun. Rydra suggests coq au vin, baked potatoes, and broiled tomatoes. Diavalo is thrilled. Strawberry shortcake for dessert. Everything is nice and normal for about thirty seconds.

Then the ship jerks. Hard. Rydra nearly slams into the ceiling. Her bubble chair pops like a balloon. Diavalo cracks his hip trying to grab the wall.

Something blew up in the drive system. The C shifter is sparking like fireworks. And here’s the problem: they haven’t even left Earth’s orbit yet. They’re stuck circling the planet with their instruments knocked out, no idea where exactly they are, and no way to communicate with anyone.

Brass, the pilot, sums it up: they could sit there eating Diavalo’s good food for six months and then suffocate. That’s their timeline.

Babel-17 Saves the Day

But here’s the thing. Rydra is sitting at dinner, thinking about circles. Their orbit. Going around and around. And suddenly she starts saying the word “circle” in every language she knows. German. Latin. Italian. She’s running through them all.

And then she stops. Because in Babel-17, the word for “circle” is built differently. It carries more information inside the word itself. The word for “great circle” in Babel-17 actually contains the fact that all great circles on a sphere must intersect each other.

She runs to the navigators and asks for a bag of marbles. Yes, marbles. A kid named Lizzy has a set. Rydra’s idea is simple and brilliant: put the marbles in the gravity-free center of the ship, arranged in a sphere. Because everything on the ship is orbiting Earth in a great circle, the marbles will naturally drift and flatten into a disk. That disk shows them the plane of their orbit. From there, they can figure out where they are.

This is the first real demonstration of what Babel-17 can do. It’s not just a code. It’s a language that makes you think differently. The word for “great circle” in Babel-17 basically tells you the solution. In English or German or Italian, you have to think through the problem step by step. In Babel-17, the answer is built into the vocabulary.

The navigators are amazed. Mollya figures it out first, shouting something in Kiswahili. Ron and Calli catch up. They can use this trick to find their position, fire their rockets to change altitude, calculate their orbit, and jump to hyperstasis where their communications gear still works.

I love this scene. Delany is showing, not just telling, why language matters. It’s not abstract philosophy. It literally saves their lives.

Someone on Board Is a Traitor

But then things get darker. Carlos, one of the platoon kids, takes Rydra down to the drive tubes. He shows her two broken circuit boards. Communication circuits and navigation controls. Both cracked. Not by accident, not by impact. Someone bent them on purpose.

That’s two problems now. Babel-17 is a mystery to solve. And there’s a saboteur on the ship.

Rydra tells Lizzy to reprint the boards. She’ll install them herself. She’s calm about it but you can feel the weight of it. Someone in her carefully chosen crew is trying to destroy the ship. Not fast, not with a bomb or a knife. Slowly. Breaking things one by one.

What I Think About This Chapter

This is where Babel-17 goes from interesting to great. Part 1 was setup. We met Rydra, we met the crew, we learned about the war and the mystery. Part 2 opens with a real problem and a real solution, and both are connected to language.

The marbles scene is one of my favorite things in science fiction. It takes an abstract idea, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (language shapes thought), and turns it into a practical rescue. You don’t need a linguistics degree to get it. Rydra knows a word in another language. That word carries information that English doesn’t. That information saves everyone.

And then there’s the traitor. Delany is building two mysteries at once. Who speaks Babel-17? And who is trying to destroy the ship? We don’t know yet if they’re connected. But you can feel Rydra’s unease. She built this crew. She’s proud of them. And now she knows one of them wants her dead.

Part 2 is off to a strong start.

This is post 7 of 19 in the Babel-17 retelling series.

Previous: Part 1, Ch 7: Into the Unknown Next: Part 2, Ch 2-3: Deeper Mystery