Babel-17 Part 5, Ch 3-4: Everything Unravels

These two chapters are where everything comes together. The mystery of the spy, the Butcher’s identity, and the true nature of Babel-17 as a weapon. Dr. T’mwarba is running the show now, and he’s got a plan that involves hamburgers, paradoxes, and a dungeon.

Chapter III: Dinner With the Crew

T’mwarba takes the whole crew out to a fancy restaurant at the top of Alliance Towers. Brass, Calli, Ron, Mollya, the Slug, and the discorporate crew members listening through the earphone.

It’s a great scene. These are Transport people. Spacers. They’ve eaten at Baron Ver Dorco’s mansion and on pirate ships, but a high-end restaurant with a ceiling designed to look like the constellations of Rymik? That’s new.

The Slug wishes he could have brought the kids. Ron whistles at the decor. Calli tucks his napkin into his zircon necklace. And when the waiter brings out the food? Hamburgers and french fries. T’mwarba ordered for them. He knows what spacers actually want to eat, fancy ceiling or not.

Mollya picks up the ketchup bottle and looks at it like she’s never seen one before. “Ketchup,” T’mwarba tells her. She puts it back down carefully.

I love this dinner scene because Delany is doing something subtle. T’mwarba is not military. He’s not barking orders. He’s feeding people burgers and asking them to talk. And it works. General Forester couldn’t get a word out of the crew. T’mwarba gets everything.

The Spy Problem

Brass brings up what nobody wants to say. There was a spy on the ship. They all know it. The spy tried to destroy the ship twice. And the spy is probably responsible for what happened to Rydra and the Butcher.

But here’s the catch. The spy could be any of them. Even someone at this very table.

T’mwarba addresses this directly. “If it is one of you,” he says, “I’m talking to the rest of you. Rydra needs somebody’s help. It’s that simple.”

And one by one, the crew explains why they want to help. Brass had lost a ship and his reputation before Rydra hired him without caring about the jinx. Calli talks about how she cuts through worlds and takes you along for the ride. Ron says she gets you thinking, makes you believe that people in other worlds are real, and if you believe in them, you believe in yourself more. Mollya says the simplest and most devastating thing: “Doctor, I was dead. She made me alive. What can I do?”

Then the discorporate crew chimes in through the earphone. They tell T’mwarba something even he didn’t know. The story about Rydra’s childhood fear. When she was young, a myna bird terrified her. T’mwarba, her psychiatrist, had always assumed it was a hysterical onset. But the discorporate crew reveals the truth. She wasn’t afraid of the bird. She was afraid of a telepathic impression of a huge worm that the bird was picturing.

Rydra was telepathic all along. She told the discorporate crew this because they live in a world of perception and thought. She never told her psychiatrist.

“Worlds,” the ghost says. “Sometimes worlds exist under your eyes and you never see.”

What T’mwarba Actually Needs

After all this, T’mwarba surprises everyone. He doesn’t want to know about the spy. He wants to know about the Butcher.

Where did the Butcher come from before his criminal life started? Before Titin prison, before December ‘61? The Butcher himself doesn’t know. Amnesia. But somewhere in the crew’s three weeks with him, there might be a clue.

Brass remembers that Rydra said he spoke a language with no word for “I.” The discorporate crew adds that Rydra taught the Butcher to say “I” and “you” in the graveyard on Jebel Tarik.

T’mwarba sits back. “The I. That’s something to go on.”

Chapter IV: Paradoxes in the Dungeon

The next chapter moves fast. T’mwarba has listened to Rydra’s tape. The first half is a grammar of Babel-17. The second half, the part Rydra specifically prepared, is full of paradoxes.

T’mwarba goes to General Forester with a plan. He needs maximum security. The deepest, most heavily guarded room the Alliance has. The General says they don’t have a dungeon. T’mwarba says “Don’t put me on. You’re fighting a war, remember?”

They end up in a cell at the center of twelve layers of defense, all impenetrable, and the whole room moves automatically every fifteen seconds so nobody can map its location. Rydra and the Butcher are strapped to chairs built into the walls.

T’mwarba’s plan is brilliant and weird. The Butcher has amnesia, meaning his consciousness is stuck in one segment of his brain, the part that formed after December ‘61. The part that only knows Babel-17. T’mwarba’s device will make that segment so uncomfortable that the Butcher’s mind will be forced to escape into the rest of his brain. Into the memories from before.

But here’s the thing. With a mind that has no concept of “I,” fear tactics won’t work. You can’t scare someone who has no self to be scared. So what will work?

Paradoxes.

T’mwarba demonstrates for the General. The Spanish barber who shaves all men who don’t shave themselves. Does he shave himself? The man who always tells the truth except on Wednesdays, and today is Wednesday. “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Yes or no.

These aren’t just brain teasers. They’re logical contradictions that exploit the structure of language itself. And Babel-17, being the most analytically exact language ever designed, is especially vulnerable to them. Everything in Babel-17 is precise. That precision becomes a trap when you feed it something that can’t be resolved.

Rydra had filled the second half of her tape with paradoxes designed specifically for Babel-17. Feed them into a mind trapped in that language, and the mind has to escape. It has to find new neural pathways. It has to break through the amnesia.

“When you do it to a computer, they burn out unless they’ve been programmed to turn off,” T’mwarba explains.

The Reveal

T’mwarba starts the machine. For a minute, nothing visible happens. Then the Butcher’s lips pull back from his teeth. Rydra’s face does the same. They’re still telepathically linked. Whatever he feels, she feels.

It’s painful. The Butcher’s head cracks against his chair. Rydra lets out a wail that chokes off into “Oh, Mocky, it hurts!” She’s surfacing again, briefly, through the pain.

The Butcher breaks one arm strap with a fist. A light goes amber. T’mwarba jams a switch. The Butcher’s body relaxes. The paradoxes have done their job.

T’mwarba releases them both. Rydra catches the Butcher as he falls forward, working her knuckles into his stiffened muscles.

The General points a gun at them. “Now who the hell is he and where is he from?”

And the Butcher speaks. But not in his old grating voice. This voice is higher, with a slight aristocratic drawl: “I’m Nyles VerDorco. Armsedge. I was born at Armsedge. And I’ve killed my father!”

The Butcher is Baron Ver Dorco’s son.

The same Baron Ver Dorco who made weapons for the Alliance. The same Baron whose mansion Rydra visited back in Part 2. The same Baron who created TW-55 and all the other custom-made spies.

And the moment the Butcher’s identity is revealed, the outer walls of the security chamber explode. Six layers of defense get breached in minutes. Something is trying to break in, something sent by the Baron’s spy network, automatic systems triggered by the Butcher recovering his memories.

But it’s too late. The Butcher now knows who he is. He has control. “You don’t have to worry about them any more,” he tells the General.

Then the whole story spills out. The Butcher, Nyles VerDorco, was his father’s first custom-built spy. Enhanced, modified, sent into Invader territory to cause chaos. And he was good at it. But eventually the Invaders captured him. They couldn’t discover his transmitter (it regrows every three weeks from organic components), but they found their own weapon. Babel-17.

They gave him total amnesia. Left him with nothing except Babel-17 as his only language. Then they let him “escape” back to Alliance territory.

No instructions to sabotage. They didn’t need instructions. The language itself was the weapon.

The Language Is the Weapon

Rydra explains the mechanism. Babel-17 is so precise and analytical that it gives you technical mastery of any situation. But it has no “I.” No self-awareness. No ability to distinguish between reality and your expression of reality. And it has built-in biases. The word for “Alliance” in Babel-17 literally translates to “one-who-has-invaded.”

Speaking Babel-17 programs a hidden personality into your mind. A personality that wants to destroy the Alliance, that uses self-hypnosis to hide its actions from the rest of your consciousness. A perfect, self-contained saboteur that doesn’t even know it’s a saboteur.

“That’s your spy!” T’mwarba says. Not a person. A personality fragment, created by the language itself, living inside anyone who learns Babel-17.

The solution isn’t to destroy the language. It’s to fix it. Add back the missing elements. Correct the ambiguities. Introduce “I” and “you.” That’s what Rydra and the Butcher started doing in the graveyard on Jebel Tarik.

The General isn’t fully convinced. He takes the tape to cryptography and locks everyone in. But the gears are turning. The war might have a new weapon. Not Babel-17. Babel-17 corrected.

My Thoughts

These two chapters are the payoff for everything. Every strange detail, every odd character choice, every philosophical tangent. It all lands here.

The idea that a language can program behavior is not just science fiction anymore. We live in a world where the words an algorithm feeds you shape what you believe and how you act. Where the language of social media creates entire personalities that people don’t fully control. Where the absence of certain words (mental health vocabulary, emotional language) can leave people unable to process their own experiences.

Delany wrote this in 1966. He was 24 years old. And he basically predicted the Information Age’s central problem: the tools we use to think with can be designed to make us think wrong.

The paradox solution is also just chef’s kiss from a writing perspective. You fight a perfect analytical language by feeding it logical contradictions. You break a prison made of words with other words. It’s poetry beating code. Which is exactly what you’d expect from a book whose hero is a poet.

Two more posts to go. Tomorrow, the finale.

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

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