Babel-17 Part 3, Chapter 4: Teaching the Butcher to Say I
This chapter is a long conversation. That’s it. Two people walking through a dark corridor on a ship, talking. And it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read in science fiction.
Rydra teaches the Butcher what “I” means. It sounds simple. It’s not.
Night Walk in the Graveyard
Rydra feels better after resting. She gets up and wanders through Tarik’s corridors during the night shift. The halls change color as she walks. White to amber to orange to red to blue. She ends up in the discorporate quarters, where the dead crew members exist as translucent ghosts who run the ship’s sensors.
The Butcher is there too. He’s checking on an alien ship passing close to Tarik. They fall into step with each other and keep walking.
She thinks: if he doesn’t know the word for I, how can he understand “we”?
He answers her question anyway. Maybe understanding and words don’t always line up.
Then he asks her something. “Why?”
Not about their walk. Not about the alien ship. He asks why she saved Jebel from Cord.
“Because I like him and because I need him to get me to Headquarters,” she starts. Then she stops. She asks: “Do you know who I am?”
He shakes his head.
He doesn’t know she’s a famous poet. He doesn’t know her background. He helped her destroy the Invader defense grid because she told him to and it worked. He got Jebel to change course because she asked. Not because of her credentials. Because of her.
The Brain
She asks where he comes from. What planet he was born on.
He doesn’t know. “The head,” he says after a moment. “They said there was something wrong with the brain.”
The doctors on Titin diagnosed him with aphasia, alexia, amnesia. No speech, no reading, no memory. But they said his brain wasn’t crazy. Just broken.
And what did he do with this broken brain? He robbed the Telechron Bank on Rhea-IV. Four hundred thousand credits. In the process: eleven people killed, four buildings blown up, all in three days. Then he stayed free for six months before they caught him.
“I take my hat off to you,” Rydra says. She means it.
The detail that gets me is how he describes it. “This hand,” he says, holding up his left, “kill four people in three days. This hand” (the right) “kill seven. Blow up four buildings with thermite. The foot kicked in the head of the guard.”
He doesn’t say “I killed.” He says “this hand killed.” Each body part acts separately. There is no unified self behind those actions. Just a collection of parts doing things.
And somehow, he also knows enough about biology to perform a difficult cesarean section and keep a fetus alive. “There’s something in that head,” Rydra says. He agrees. “The doctors say the brain not stupid.”
What Is I
So she tries to teach him.
“First of all it’s very important,” she says. “A good deal more important than anything else. The brain will let any number of things go to pot as long as ‘I’ stay alive. That’s because the brain is part of I.”
The Butcher nods. “Yes. But I am what?”
“That’s a question only you can answer.”
It’s a beautiful exchange. She’s explaining the most basic concept in human consciousness to someone who literally doesn’t have it. And she’s doing it with simple words and patience. No lecture. No theory. Just two people trying to understand each other.
Aliens and Why Words Matter
To make her point, she tells him about the Ciribians. They’re one of nine galaxy-hopping species. Friendly to the Alliance. Their ships look like triple-yoked poached eggs wrapped in mosquito netting. Flimsy as feathers. But they fly.
And here’s the thing. Their culture is based entirely on heat and temperature. They have no word for “house” or “home.” To explain what a house is to a Ciribian, you’d need to describe it as “an enclosure that creates a temperature difference with the outside, capable of keeping comfortable a creature with a uniform body temperature of ninety-eight-point-six…” and on and on for forty-five minutes.
But flip it around. A solar energy conversion plant at the Court of Outer Worlds takes up an area bigger than Tarik. One Ciribian can walk through it and then describe it to another Ciribian who’s never seen it, in nine words. Nine small words. So the second Ciribian can build an exact duplicate. Down to the paint color on the walls.
“In English it would take a couple of books full of schematics and electrical and architectural specifications,” Rydra says. “They have the proper nine words. We don’t.”
The Butcher says that’s impossible. She points at the alien ship wobbling across their viewscreen. “So’s that. But it’s there and flying.”
If you have the right words, things get easier. If you don’t have the words, you can’t even have the ideas.
This is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in action. Not as theory. As plot. As character development. As the reason a dangerous ex-convict is learning what “I” means from a poet in the middle of deep space.
You and I Get Confused
Then the Butcher puts his hand on her cheek. Cock’s spur resting on her lower lip.
“You and I,” he says. “Nobody else is here. Just you and I. But which is which?”
“You’re getting the idea.”
He tries to use the words. And makes a beautifully logical mistake. He reverses them. Every time he says “you,” he means himself. Every time he says “I,” he means her.
“You like me,” he says, pointing to her. “Even when I first came on Tarik, there was something about me that you liked.” He means: I like you. Even when you first came on Tarik, there was something about you that I liked.
“I told you how to destroy the Invaders defense net, and you destroyed it, for me.” He means: You told me how to destroy the net, and I destroyed it, for you.
She realizes he’s got the concept but swapped the labels. Each person’s “I” is someone else’s “you.” They’re the same sort of thing. So in his mind they’re interchangeable.
“Then you and I are the same,” he says.
She nods, risking the confusion. Because in a way, he’s right.
“If you ever rob another bank, you will give me all the money,” he says. Meaning: if I ever rob another bank, I will give you all the money.
“You will kill anyone that tries to hurt me.” Meaning: I will kill anyone who tries to hurt you.
She turns away and puts her fist against her mouth. “One hell of a teacher I am! You don’t understand a thing I am talking about.”
But he does. In his way. The language is backward but the feeling is real.
What Scares You
They share fears. She tells him about the myna bird.
When she was a kid, her doctor gave her a trained myna bird. It said “Hello, Rydra, it’s a fine day and I’m happy.” But the bird didn’t know what the words meant. In the bird’s mind, those sounds meant “there’s another earthworm coming.” And because Rydra could already sense what things were thinking, she didn’t hear “hello.” She saw and smelled an earthworm five-sixths as long as she was tall. And she was supposed to eat it.
She got hysterical. Never told anyone until now.
The Butcher responds with his own story. After robbing the bank on Rhea, he hid in ice caves on Dis. Twelve-foot worms with acid slime on their skins burrowed up out of the rocks. He rigged an electric net from his hop-sled and killed them. Once he knew he could beat them, he wasn’t afraid anymore. He would have eaten them if the acid hadn’t made them toxic.
“You are not frightened of the things I am frightened of,” he says (with the pronouns still reversed). “I am not frightened of the things you are frightened of. That’s good, isn’t it?”
Yeah. It kind of is.
The Thing He Can’t Say
Then something changes. He holds her face between his hands. His face comes close. Tears.
“The baby, the baby that died,” he says. “The brain afraid, afraid for you, that you would be alone.”
He means: afraid that I would be alone.
He’s been alone his whole life. Alone on Rhea with stolen money. Alone on Dis with acid worms. Alone in Titin prison, loneliest of all, because nobody understood him when he spoke and he didn’t understand them. Maybe because they kept saying “I” and “you” and he didn’t know what those sounds meant.
He wanted to raise the dead baby. So someone would grow up speaking his language. So both of them wouldn’t be alone.
“It died,” he says. One more time.
Then he offers Rydra something. If she’s ever in real danger, she can go into his brain and use whatever she finds. His memories of fighting, running, winning. All of it. Available to her.
“I ask you, only, to wait until you have done everything else first.”
She agrees. But there’s something he won’t tell her. Something that scares him. Something connected to his new understanding of “I” and “you.” Whatever it is, it makes him cry. And he won’t let her read his mind to find out.
“You mustn’t do that to me. Please.”
She promises she won’t.
My Thoughts
I’m going to be honest. This chapter hit me harder than anything else in the book so far.
On the surface it’s a conversation. Two characters walking and talking. No action. No explosions. No battle strategy. But what happens between them is bigger than any space fight.
Delany does something here that most sci-fi writers wouldn’t even attempt. He takes the central idea of his novel, that language shapes thought, and makes it deeply personal. The Butcher isn’t a theoretical example. He’s a real person (well, a real character) who has lived without the concept of self. And what that absence did to him is tragic. Not because he’s stupid. He’s clearly brilliant. But because he’s been fundamentally alone in a way that most people can’t even imagine.
And Rydra, the linguist, the poet, tries to fix it with words. She partly succeeds. He learns “I.” But he swaps it with “you,” because in his mind they really are the same thing. And there’s something beautiful and terrifying about that. He’s not wrong. He’s just thinking in a language that doesn’t have the right categories.
The myna bird story is one of those small details that makes this book feel so lived-in. Rydra has carried this bizarre childhood trauma, of perceiving a bird’s thought of earthworms as a giant worm coming for her, for her entire life. And the only person she can tell is a brain-damaged convict who fought actual giant worms in ice caves. They match. Not because they’re similar, but because their fears are perfectly complementary.
This is what great science fiction looks like. Ideas that change characters. Characters that make ideas feel real.
This is post 13 of 19 in the Babel-17 retelling series.
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