Babel-17 Part 3, Chapters 2-3: Things Get Brutal on Jebel Tarik

These two chapters hit hard. If Part 3’s first chapter was about arriving somewhere new and interesting, chapters 2 and 3 are about learning just how dangerous that place really is. People die. Rydra makes a discovery about the Butcher. And she finds out what Babel-17 can really do to human beings, including herself.

Chapter 2: Death in the Loading Dock

Life on Jebel Tarik settles into a routine. Sort of. The crew of the Rimbaud pitches in. Rydra sends the platoon kids down to help with carter-winches in the loading dock. Jebel’s people are stripping the wreckage of the Invader ship and the Alliance supply vessel for parts, fuel, and supplies. The Rimbaud itself is going to be stripped too.

That’s the deal. Jebel saved their lives. In exchange, he gets their ship’s fuel and spare parts. Rydra gets to keep her papers and recordings. Fair enough, she figures.

Then something goes wrong.

A woman in a silver skin suit drops out of the wreckage of an Invader cruiser. She hits the conveyor belt, rolls between the prongs, jumps to the floor, and runs. Her hood falls back. Brown hair swinging. And Rydra sees that this woman is at least seven months pregnant.

A mechanic throws a wrench. It bounces off her hip. She keeps running.

Then the vibra-gun hisses. Twice. The woman sits down hard. Kicks once. Kicks again.

On the tower above, the Butcher puts his gun back in the holster.

The moment is awful. And what follows is worse. Not the act itself, but the social dynamics around it. Jebel says softly, “That was unnecessary.” Rydra can feel Jebel watching her reaction. And she realizes that reacting to the horror in her stomach might cost her life. So she says what Jebel was about to say, before he says it: “They will put pregnant women on fighting ships. Their reflexes are faster.”

She watches him relax.

This is cold calculus. And Rydra knows it. She’s reading people, predicting their words, managing the situation to stay alive. It’s ugly. But it’s real.

The Butcher comes down from the tower, banging his fist against his thigh. His complaint is practical, not moral. The crew should ray everything before bringing it aboard. This is the second time in two months someone’s gotten through. That’s his concern. Process failure, not dead pregnant women.

The Butcher’s Other Side

But then Rydra goes looking for the Butcher later. She finds him in the biology theater.

He’s standing in front of a tank with a tiny figure floating in it. The baby. He performed a cesarean section. Tried to save the child from the woman he just shot.

“It died,” he says. “It was alive until five minutes ago. Seven and a half months. It should have lived. It was strong enough!”

His fist cracks against his palm. That same gesture he keeps making. Frustration. Rage at something he can’t fix.

The Invader woman lies on the operating table behind him. Sectioned. He did the autopsy himself. Internal organs destroyed. Abdominal necrosis all the way through. She was already dying before she got out.

But the baby should have lived.

This scene is incredible. The same man who shot a pregnant woman without hesitation tried to save her unborn child with surgery. And he’s angry that it died. How do you reconcile that? Delany doesn’t ask you to. He just shows you and lets you sit with it.

Rydra asks the Butcher to get Jebel to take them to Administrative Alliance Headquarters. She has information about the next sabotage attempt. The Butcher doesn’t ask for her credentials. Doesn’t question her plan. He just calls Jebel and tells him to do it.

“Make Tarik go down the Dragon’s Tongue during the first cycle.”

Done.

She’s stunned. He didn’t even ask why. And then he explains, in his rough way: “Knowing what ships to destroy, and ships are destroyed.” He bangs his fist against his chest. “Now to go down the Dragon’s Tongue, Tarik go down the Dragon’s Tongue.”

She starts to walk away. And then she realizes something.

His words. The way he talks.

He can’t say “I.”

Chapter 3: No Word for I

“Brass, he can’t say ‘I’!” Rydra is practically bouncing with excited curiosity. “Me, my, mine, myself. I don’t think he can say any of those either. Or think them.”

This is the big discovery. The Butcher has no concept of self. No first-person pronoun. He refers to his brain as “the brain,” his hand as “this hand,” never “my brain” or “my hand.” He bangs his chest because he has no word for the thing inside that chest that wants and decides and acts.

Rydra asks Brass if he knows any language without a word for “I.” Brass doesn’t. She can think of some where it’s not used often, but none where the concept doesn’t exist at all.

What does that mean? What kind of person walks around without any sense of self?

She tells Brass she wants to understand the Butcher because he’s aligned himself with her. He follows her instructions. He’s her ally on Tarik. “I’d like to understand, so I won’t hurt him.”

Telepathy in the Commons

Then comes one of the most intense scenes in the book.

Rydra is sitting in the commons at dinner. She starts thinking in Babel-17. And suddenly she’s not just reading body language anymore. She’s reading minds.

Not in a mystical way. More like the language gives her the grammar to parse human signals. Body movements, micro-expressions, muscle tics. Babel-17 translates all of it into something readable. The man entering the hall is the grieving brother of Pigfoot (the spider-boat pilot who was killed in battle). The girl who served them chicken is in love with a dead boy from the discorporate sector.

And then she finds Geoffry Cord.

Cord is planning to murder Jebel. She reads the whole plan straight from his mind. It’s elaborate. A poisoned knife, grooved metal with paralytic venom. A hollow tooth filled with hypnotic drugs. A fake story implanted by the personafix machine. He’s going to stab Jebel during the evening entertainment, bite his own tooth to fake being under someone else’s control, frame the Butcher, then eventually take over Tarik through the Butcher.

All of this pours through Rydra’s mind while she sits at the dinner table.

When Klik invites her to the stage to speak, she uses it. She recites a poem. But it’s not really a poem. It’s a weapon. She crafts the words in Babel-17 but speaks them in English, timing the rhythm to the processes of Cord’s body. Each beat designed to jar, to strike against his internal rhythms. She names his plan. His blade. His fear.

“Cord, to be lord of this black barrick, Tarik’s, you need more than jackal lore, or a belly full of murder and jelly knees.”

It drives him crazy. Literally. He screams, flips his table, and charges her with the knife.

She kicks him in the face. He falls. Brass comes running. Jebel comes running. And the Butcher is already between her and Cord, because of course he is.

Then the Butcher takes the knife from Cord. He examines it. And, not particularly quickly, he pushes the handle into Cord’s eye.

Rydra’s heart stops. “But you didn’t even check… Suppose I was wrong…”

The Butcher looks at her coldly. “He moved with a knife on Tarik toward Jebel or Lady and he dies.”

Right fist on left palm. Soundless this time, because both hands are covered in blood.

The Price of Babel-17

After this, Rydra gets violently sick. The telepathy, the heightened perception, the accelerated thinking. It all has a physical cost. Her body can’t handle what Babel-17 does to her mind.

She lies in the blue room and thinks about what happened. It wasn’t what her old doctor, Mocky, used to describe. It was what Mocky kept insisting: telepathy. But it’s not a superpower she was born with. It’s the combination of her existing sensitivity to people and this new language. Babel-17 gives her the framework to decode what she was always partially sensing.

The tapes from the Rimbaud tell her the next sabotage attempt will be at Administrative Alliance Headquarters. She needs to get there. But she’s also drawn to the Butcher. His “egoless brutality” is, for all its horror, still human. And she finds herself fascinated by this man who has no word for himself.

“What could you say to a man who could not say I?” she wonders. “What could he say to her?”

My Thoughts

These two chapters are maybe the most violent in the book. A pregnant woman gets shot. A man gets a knife handle shoved in his eye. But Delany never makes the violence gratuitous. Each act reveals character. The Butcher shoots without hesitation, then performs surgery to save the baby. He kills Cord without checking if Rydra’s accusation was true, because in his world, someone who pulls a knife on Jebel or Rydra simply dies. There’s no trial. No deliberation. Just action.

And the telepathy scene. Man, that’s something. Rydra walks through a crowded room and reads the entire emotional landscape of every person in it. She pulls a murder plot out of a man’s head, then uses poetry as a weapon to expose him. The language doesn’t just let her think differently. It turns her into something more than human.

But it nearly kills her every time she uses it. That’s the cost. And that cost is what keeps this book from being a simple power fantasy. Babel-17 gives and it takes. Every time Rydra thinks in it, she pays with her body.

The Butcher’s inability to say “I” is one of those science fiction concepts that sticks with you. What does it mean to exist without self-reference? How do you relate to others when you can’t even describe yourself as a separate being? And is it the Invaders who took that from him, or was it something else?

We’ll find out more about that soon. Next chapter, Rydra decides to teach the Butcher who he is.

This is post 12 of 19 in the Babel-17 retelling series.

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