Babel-17 Part 3, Chapter 1: Welcome to Jebel Tarik

Part 3 opens and everything is different. New location. New people. New danger. Rydra and what’s left of her crew wake up on a strange ship, and the rules have changed completely.

Waking Up in Babel-17

The chapter starts inside Rydra’s head. And it’s one of the most interesting passages in the book so far.

She’s in a blue room. Half-conscious. And her mind is doing what it does best: thinking about language. Finnish has sixteen noun cases. Some American Indian languages don’t even distinguish between singular and plural. Spanish forces you to assign gender to every object. Hungarian doesn’t care about gender at all. The old English “thou” versus “you” carried social rank. And some Asian languages have so many forms of “you” that you can pack respect, contempt, friendship, and threat all into a single pronoun.

Then she thinks about names. What’s in a name? What is she? She’s someone in this room, she’s…

And then she opens her eyes.

Here’s where it gets wild. She tries to “look at the room.” But that’s not what happens. In Babel-17, the word for what she does is not “look” and the place is not a “room.” It’s a tiny sound that covers passive perception (could be sight, smell, hearing). And the “room” becomes three small sounds blended at different musical pitches. One tells her the size (about twenty-five feet, cubical). One tells her the color and material (blue metal). And the third is a placeholder that will fill in the room’s function once she figures it out.

All four sounds together take less time to think and say than the single clumsy word “room.”

That’s Babel-17. She’s not just learning it anymore. She’s thinking in it. And it feels, she says, like a lens that’s been blurry for years suddenly snapping into focus.

Breaking Free

Here’s the first practical proof that Babel-17 changes what you can do, not just how you think.

She’s held in a medical web. In English, it’s just webbing. Sturdy. Hard to escape. Brass was pushing against it for ten minutes and couldn’t get free.

But in Babel-17, the word for this web is a three-part sound that defines each stress point in the mesh. The weakest points are identified when the total sound reaches its lowest pitch. Pop the cords at those points and the whole thing unravels.

She pops a cord. Pops another. The whole web falls apart. It takes her seconds.

Brass stares at her. “How did you do that?”

She just shrugs. “Tell you some other time.”

This is a small moment but it matters a lot. The language doesn’t just let her describe things more efficiently. It shows her how things work. It finds the weak points. The structural flaws. It’s like having x-ray vision for patterns.

Where Are They?

The silver-haired man who comes in says one word: “Jebel Tarik.”

Rydra figures it out fast. Tarik means mountain in Old Moorish. And they’re not on a base or station. They’re on a ship. A massive ship.

A girl brings them food and accidentally reveals they were pulled out of a nova. Their ship, the Rimbaud, drifted into the Cygnus-42 nova area after the saboteur took over. Their stasis generators were about to fail. Whoever runs this mountain-ship hooked them out just in time.

Brass does the math. If Jebel Tarik can hook a ship out of a nova, this thing must be as big as a battleship.

And it sort of is. But not an official one.

Shadow-Ships and Space Pirates

When Rydra finally meets Jebel, the ship’s commander, she gets the full picture. And it’s fascinating.

Jebel Tarik is a shadow-ship. They patrol the Specelli Snap, a region of space so dense with radio interference that ships can’t be detected or receive orders. It runs along the edge of Invader-controlled space.

The Alliance knows about them. Can’t give them orders. Can’t supply them. So they look the other way while Jebel and his people raid passing ships for supplies. Invader ships, mostly. But when times are lean, they’ll take from Alliance ships too. Stellar-men call them looters.

It’s basically piracy. But with a code of honor. And Jebel is genuinely cultured. He has three copies of Rydra’s poetry books. One salvaged from an Invader ship, one from an Alliance destroyer, one acquired recently. He quotes her own lines back to her. He invites her to recite for his crew at dinner.

“We live dangerously,” Jebel tells her. “Perhaps that is why we live well. We are civilized, when we have time.”

I love this character. He’s a space pirate who reads poetry and sets up dinner theater. The whole setup of Jebel Tarik is this weird mix of medieval court and military outpost. People salute by touching their foreheads. There’s a jester named Klik who’s been surgically modified to look like a griffin-monkey-seahorse hybrid. It’s theatrical and strange and completely believable in Delany’s world.

The Butcher Appears

Then there’s the Butcher.

He was one of three men Rydra saw when she first woke up. The other two were Jebel and Klik. The Butcher stood at the back. Tall. Powerful. Shaved head. Cock’s spurs grafted onto his wrists and heels. A red band on his bicep, a convict’s mark from the Titin penal caves.

“Something about him was brutal enough to make her glance away,” Delany writes. “Something was graceful enough to make her look back.”

That’s a perfect introduction. We don’t know his story yet. But we know he matters.

When an Invader tracking ship shows up near an Alliance supply vessel, the Butcher wants to attack. Jebel hesitates, says they’ve eaten well enough this month. The Butcher cracks his fist against his palm. Not words. Just force. Jebel changes his mind. They’ll watch, then fight.

The Battle

Jebel’s battle commands are amazing. He uses a psychiatric asylum as his code system. The three groups of spider-boats are the psychotics, the neurotics, and the criminally insane. “Simulate severe depression, non-communicative, with repressed hostility.” “Commence the first psychotic episode.”

It would be funny if it weren’t so effective.

The Invader releases its own cruisers in a defensive grid. Three groups of ships sweeping in a three-way web pattern. And Rydra sees it.

The grid is exactly the same structure as the medical web she tore apart that morning. Same three-way stress pattern. Same weak points. She figured it out in Babel-17, where the same word describes both a medical bandage mesh and a defensive grid of spaceships.

She grabs a microphone, coordinates with her navigators, and starts calling out positions. Hit this spot in twenty-seven seconds. Hit that spot forty seconds later. The Butcher follows her instructions without questioning. The web falls apart.

Jebel announces “advance for group therapy” and the spider-boats surge through the holes she’s made. The Invader ship goes up in flames.

Five minutes. One spider-boat lost. A record.

The Crash After

After the battle, Rydra feels sick. She was thinking in Babel-17 the whole time. Everything moved in slow motion for her. Everyone seemed painfully slow. When she switches back to English, the nausea hits hard.

“Sick,” she says. “Jesus, I feel sick.”

This is important. Babel-17 gives her incredible abilities. Pattern recognition. Speed of thought. Strategic genius. But there’s a physical cost. Her body can’t keep up with what the language does to her mind.

She walks it off and runs into the Butcher in the corridor. He just points her in the right direction. No words. No mockery about her being lost. Just help. And she notices something: the expected amusement that someone might feel over a lost person is completely absent from him. It doesn’t annoy her that it’s missing. It charms her.

“Also it fit the angular brutality she had watched before,” Delany writes, “as well as the great animal grace of him.”

My Thoughts

This chapter does so much work. It shifts the whole setting. We’re off the Rimbaud and onto Jebel Tarik, and suddenly the book feels bigger. The world-building here is dense but never heavy. Shadow-ships, spider-boats, the Specelli Snap, the whole social structure of this floating mountain. Delany throws it all at you and it just works.

But the real star of this chapter is the Babel-17 language itself. We’ve been told it’s powerful. Now we see it in action. The same linguistic pattern that unravels a medical web also breaks a military formation. That’s not a metaphor. It’s the actual plot mechanic. The language finds the structural logic underneath different systems and reveals that they’re the same.

If that doesn’t make you think about how our own language limits what we can see, I don’t know what will.

And the Butcher. We barely know him yet. But Delany has set him up perfectly. Brutal and graceful. Silent and present. A convict who makes Rydra feel safe. The tension between those contradictions is going to drive a lot of what comes next.

Tomorrow, things get violent. War zone incoming.

This is post 11 of 19 in the Babel-17 retelling series.

Previous: Part 2, Ch 5: Shifting Gears Next: Part 3, Ch 2-3: War Zone