Babel-17 Part 2, Ch 2-3: The War Yards, the Baron, and His Collection of Ways to Kill
Two chapters in one post today because they flow together perfectly. Chapter 2 gets Rydra to the Alliance War Yards. Chapter 3 is a tour of weapons that would make any Bond villain jealous. And through it all, the mystery gets thicker.
Arrival at Armsedge
The ship jumps into hyperstasis and comes out at Armsedge, the Alliance War Yards. Delany describes the jump beautifully: “Drop a gem in thick oil. The brilliance yellows slowly, ambers, goes red at last, dies.” That’s the leap in. And the leap out is the reverse, a jewel flung into a pile of jewels.
Rydra puts on the Sensory Helmet. This thing translates all the ship’s sensor data into sight, sound, and smell for the captain. The War Yards show up as loops of blue and indigo light. There’s a musical hum. The smell of perfumes and hot oil mixed with burning citrus peel. Each discorporate observer (the ghost crew members) perceives a different frequency range and translates it for her.
It’s weird and beautiful. Delany’s future is full of sensory experiences that don’t map to anything we know. But it works because he commits to the details.
But there’s also a traitor on board. Rydra knows someone broke those circuit plates on purpose. And she can’t figure out who. Every name on her crew list has a question mark next to it.
Baron Ver Dorco
They dock and Rydra meets Baron Ver Dorco. He’s in charge of coordinating research projects against the Invaders. And from the first moment, Rydra doesn’t like him.
Here’s the thing about the Baron. He’s polite. He’s cultured. He reads heraldry and talks about isolated communities speaking different languages. But when he realizes Rydra is THE Rydra Wong, the famous poet, something shifts. Delany describes his reaction as “a disquieting appetite for her presence, a hunger.” His tongue is “purplish and flickering behind white, white teeth.” His lips form words “as languidly as the slow mandibles of the cannibal mantis.”
That’s not how you describe someone you trust.
The Baron insists Rydra and her entire crew come to dinner at his house. Rydra tries to refuse three times. The Baron doesn’t take no for an answer. It’s all very polite on the surface. Underneath, Rydra feels like a pig over a barbecue pit. Her words, not mine.
The Tour of Horrors
Before dinner, the Baron gives Rydra a personal tour of his weapons collection. And this is where Delany really shows what kind of world this is.
First room: bombs. The Baron calls them “gross, uncivilized weapons.” The small one destroys fifty square miles. The big ones leave craters 150 miles across. But his favorite is the sneaky one. It explodes once, just enough to flatten a building. Then everyone rushes in with rescue workers and reconstruction crews. Six hours later, it explodes again as a hydrogen bomb. Kills all the helpers. The Baron thinks this is clever.
Second room: a chunk of metal that you can’t pick up. Your hand just misses it every time you reach for it. But when the Baron picks it up, it turns into whatever weapon he needs. A vibra-gun. A wrench. A machete. A crossbow. It’s made of “polarized matter” that exists only on certain perceptual wavelengths. You can smuggle it onto enemy ships and it’ll mess up their drive systems because it has inertia but no detectable weight or volume.
And the real weapon isn’t the chunk of metal. It’s the filing cabinets along the wall with three thousand plans for how to use it. “The weapon is the knowledge of what to do with what you have.” The Baron demonstrates this by explaining exactly how a six-inch piece of vanadium wire can kill someone, going through the brain from the inner corner of the eye. He says this casually, the same way you’d explain how to change a tire.
Third room: poisons. The “Borgia” department. Diphtheria toxin. Cyanide. And the really nasty stuff: catalytics. Chemicals that by themselves do nothing. But add a tiny whiff of a specific catalyst gas, and one gives you blindness, another gives you deafness, another causes total brain death over a week, and another just kills you.
The Baron describes all of this with the enthusiasm of a wine collector showing off his cellar.
The Spy in the Glass Case
But the last room is the worst. Rydra’s invisible ghost bodyguard tells her to ask what’s in there (the message comes through as Basque, which is how she remembers communications from discorporate crew).
Inside is a seven-foot display case. In it stands what looks like a statue of a perfect human being. But it’s not a statue. It’s TW-55. A genetically engineered, artificially grown spy.
The Baron explains it with pride. They selected parents carefully. Artificial insemination. Grew the embryo to a physiological age of sixteen in just six months using hormones. This cuts the life span by 75%. But the Baron doesn’t care. “We are making weapons.”
TW-55 has fifty percent faster reflexes than a normal human. It can change its fingerprints, restructure its face (all facial muscles are voluntary thanks to neural surgery), and grow new hair in thirty minutes. It has six hours of social conversation programmed in, including dropping Rydra’s name twice over the course of an evening. It’s an expert assassin, can disable any Invader technology, and is a master of torture. It’s totally obedient to its designated superiors. And there is nothing in its head “even akin to a super-ego.”
The Baron calls it “one of my favorites.”
Rydra calls it beautiful, because it is. But when the Baron asks if she wants him to wake it up, and then suggests they go to dinner instead, she sees his jaw involuntarily working. Like the words “dinner” and something else are fighting in his mouth.
“Like the circus,” Rydra says. “But I’m older now.”
What I Think
These two chapters are Delany at his most unsettling. The Baron is not a villain in the obvious sense. He’s the guy running the war effort. He’s on Rydra’s side. But the way he talks about killing, about human life as raw material, about TW-55 as a product with “faults” he’d like to improve, it tells you everything about what this war has done to people.
And there’s a pattern here. The Baron talks about isolated communities speaking different languages. He says society would fall apart without the war to hold it together. That’s the theme of the whole book. Language connects people. War isolates them. And the people who make weapons have stopped speaking a language that includes empathy.
The Baroness, by the way, seems much more human. But we’ll see more of her in the next chapter.
Also, don’t forget: there’s still a traitor on Rydra’s ship. And they’re now parked at the most important military installation in the Alliance. If sabotage happens here, it’s as bad as it gets.
This is post 8 of 19 in the Babel-17 retelling series.
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