Babel-17 Part 2, Chapter 4: Dinner, Marbles, Murder, and Bandicoots

This is the big chapter. Chapter 4 of Part 2 is where everything blows up. Sometimes literally. It’s a dinner party that starts awkward, gets personal, and ends in blood. Let’s go.

The Baroness

We already met Baron Ver Dorco and he gave Rydra the creeps. But now we meet the Baroness. And she’s a surprise.

Delany describes her as plump, puffy, with a pink-gray look “suggesting something parboiled.” Her smile gets distorted by the weight of her own cheeks. She’s loud and breathy and damp. Not exactly a flattering picture.

But here’s the thing. The Baroness is actually the most real person in this entire party. She’s honest. She says what she thinks. When Rydra’s crew shows up and Calli starts loudly telling everyone which appetizers he likes and which ones he hates (“those real salty ones with the fish, I didn’t like those at all”), the Baroness loves it. She leans in and says, “I never really like the salty ones either!”

She tells Rydra what’s wrong with the War Yards. All these bright young people come here with their imaginations, and they spend all day thinking about ways to kill. “Imagination should be used for something other than pondering murder, don’t you think?”

And she says something that really stuck with me. She tells Rydra that her crew is special because they actually talk to each other. They share what they like, what they don’t, how things work. “You tell the important things.” Nobody else at the Yards does that. They all just go along with whatever is served, whatever is said.

There’s a real sadness to the Baroness. She knows the War Yards are destroying people’s humanity, even as they build bigger weapons.

The Kids Play Marbles

Meanwhile, Lizzy (the platoon kid who lent her marbles for the orbit rescue) has gotten into a marbles game at the party. She’s showing the local fancy kids how to shoot. “It’s all in the wrist,” she says, and nails three-for-one shots that get applause from the crowd.

A weapons ballistics expert is watching with genuine fascination. The Baroness says this is exactly what she means. Rydra’s crew brings something “cool and pleasing, so fresh, so crisp.” Even a game of marbles is more alive than anything these people normally experience.

Rydra and Ron on the Balcony

Then Rydra drifts away from the party and finds Ron sitting alone on the balcony, hugging his knees. Too many people for him.

This is one of the most personal scenes in the book. Ron is struggling with his triple. Remember, in this future, “tripling” is a three-person relationship. It’s normal in Transport culture but looked down on by Customs (conventional) society. Ron is the youngest in his triple with Calli and Mollya, and things are rough. Calli can’t communicate well with Mollya because of the language barrier (she speaks Kiswahili). And because Calli is frustrated, he pulls away from both of them.

Ron calls out Rydra. “How the hell would you understand! You write what you see. Not what you do.” He calls the party guests and all Customs people “staring at us, who can’t understand why you could want more than two.”

But Rydra understands more than he thinks. She was tripled herself. For three years. With two guys: Fobo Lombs, a ship captain who drank too much and didn’t like sleeping in the middle of the bed because he wanted one arm hanging over the edge. And Muels Aranlyde, who wrote the “Comet Jo” adventure books.

Fobo was killed in a cave-in. Muels caught Caulder’s disease and is in suspended animation. Rydra lost both of them.

She shares all of this with Ron. Not as advice from a captain. Just as someone who knows what it’s like. And then she gives him practical advice: teach Mollya how to handle Calli’s moods (Ron knows how, just show her). And teach Calli some Kiswahili so he can reach Mollya. There’s a grammar book in her cabin.

“Do you think he’ll do it?” Ron asks. “To get closer to Mollya?” Rydra says. And Ron stands up like metal unbending. “He will.”

I love this scene because it’s about language again. Calli and Mollya can’t communicate. The solution isn’t a weapon or a trick. It’s learning words. Language connects people. Same theme as the whole book, just on a personal level instead of a galactic one.

The Stranger on the Stairs

Rydra heads back inside and meets a stranger on the spiral staircase. He’s in his late twenties, blue-black hair, craggy face, moves with incredible economy. He gives nothing away when she watches him. He quotes Shakespeare about the Baron: “Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look.”

They talk briefly. He calls the partygoers bandicoots with thalassanemia. Then dinner is announced and he disappears into the crowd.

Remember those words. Bandicoots. Thalassanemia. They’re going to matter.

Murder at Dinner

The Baroness is running the dinner from a console under the table. She’s proud of it. Platters of fruit rise from the center of the table. Wine fountains start flowing. It’s elaborate and fun.

Then Rydra gets a message from her invisible discorporate bodyguard (translated through Basque in her head): Babel-17 is transmitting on the ship’s equipment. An attack is coming.

Rydra tells the Baron. He starts checking his security systems. Everything seems fine. But the stranger from the staircase comes walking fast around the table, leans over the Baron’s shoulder, whispers something, and then the Baron falls forward. Blood trickles from beneath his face.

The Baron is dead.

The stranger pulls out a vibra-gun. Rydra yanks the Baroness out of the way. The shot hits the dinner console instead. And now the automated meal goes haywire. Peacocks rise from the table. Soup overflows into the wine basins. Fruit rolls everywhere. Lambs on spits knock over the peacocks. Desserts shoot across the table and shatter on the floor. Boiling coffee splatters. People are screaming and slipping on honey-glazed bananas.

It’s chaos. But deadly chaos. The stranger is still shooting. Dr. Crane goes down. Four key officials are killed. Rydra yells at Slug to get the kids out. She tells Calli to get the navigators back to the ship.

Then she stops the Slug and asks him two questions. What’s a bandicoot? (A vicious marsupial.) What’s thalassanemia? (A hereditary blood disease where the haptoglobins break down.)

And Rydra says, “I’ve figured it out.”

Because the stranger mentioned haptoglobins in marsupials. And the Baron said TW-55 was programmed to talk about “haptoglobin grouping among the marsupials” as its area of scholarly expertise. That stranger was TW-55. The genetically engineered spy weapon. Someone activated it and turned it against its own creators.

Rydra grabs Brass and rides on his back as he leaps over the table. Guests scatter before the huge, fanged, golden beast. They bolt for the exit.

What I Think

This chapter is wild. Delany packs a party scene, an emotional conversation about love and loss, a Shakespeare quote, a clue hidden in medical terminology, an assassination, and a food fight from hell into one chapter. And it all works.

The TW-55 reveal is great because Delany set it up perfectly. The stranger quotes Shakespeare and uses the word “bandicoots” in casual conversation, exactly the kind of social programming the Baron described. And his one area of deep expertise, haptoglobin in marsupials, is the thread that lets Rydra identify him. The weapon was turned against its maker.

But the heart of the chapter is the conversation on the balcony. Rydra sharing her losses with Ron, talking about Fobo’s drinking and Muels’ books, and giving real advice about communication in a relationship. In a book about language as weapon, here’s language as medicine.

And Babel-17 transmitted during the attack. Again. Every sabotage event is preceded by Babel-17. The language and the attacks are connected. But how?

This is post 9 of 19 in the Babel-17 retelling series.

Previous: Part 2, Ch 2-3: Deeper Mystery Next: Part 2, Ch 5: Shifting Gears