Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (9780063021440)

Strikers in this country never won broad public support, for the public merely wanted all the conveniences of modern life without the guilt of knowing how those conveniences were procured. And why should the translators succeed where other strikers – white strikers, no less – had failed?

There was at least one reason to hope. They were running on momentum. The social forces that had prompted the Luddites to smash machines had not disappeared. They had only grown worse. Silver-powered looms and spinning machines were getting cheaper and more ubiquitous, enriching none but factory owners and financiers. Each year they put more men out of work, left more families destitute, and maimed and killed more children in machines that operated more quickly than the human eye could track. The use of silver created inequality, and both had increased exponentially in England during the past decade. The country was pulling apart at the seams. This could not go on forever.

And their strike, Robin was convinced, was different. Their impact was larger, harder to patch over. There were no alternatives to Babel, no scabs. No one else could do what they did. Britain could not function without them. If Parliament did not believe it, then they would soon learn.

Still no policemen had appeared by evening. This lack of response baffled them. But soon logistical problems – namely, supplies and accommodation – became the more pressing matters at hand. It was clear now that they were going to be in the tower for quite some time, with no clear end date to their strike. At some point they were going to run out of food.

There was a tiny, rarely used kitchen in the basement, where servants had once lived before the Institute stopped housing its janitorial staff for free. Occasionally scholars ducked downstairs for a snack when working late. A foray into the cabinets produced a decent amount of nonperishables – nuts, preserves, indestructible tea biscuits, and dry oats for porridge. It wasn’t much, but they wouldn’t starve overnight. And they found many, many bottles of wine, left over from years of faculty functions and garden parties.

‘Absolutely not,’ said Professor Craft when Juliana and Meghana proposed bringing the bottles upstairs. ‘Put those back. We need to keep our wits about us.’

‘We need something to pass the time,’ said Meghana. ‘And if we’re going to starve to death, we may as well go out drunk.’

‘They’re not going to starve us to death,’ Robin said. ‘They can’t allow us to die. They can’t hurt us. That’s the point.’

‘Even so,’ said Yusuf. ‘We’ve just declared our intention to break the city. I don’t think we can just wander out for a hot breakfast, do you?’

Nor could they simply poke their heads outside and put in an order to the grocer’s. They had no friends in town, no one who could act as their liaison with the outer world. Professor Craft had a brother in Reading, but there was no way of getting a letter to him, and nor was there a safe way for him to deliver foodstuffs up to the tower. And Professor Chakravarti, it turned out, had a very limited relationship with Hermes – he’d been recruited only after his promotion to junior faculty, after his ties to upper faculty rendered him too risky for deeper involvement – and he knew Hermes only through anonymous letters and drop points. No one else had responded to their beacon. As far as they knew, they were the only ones left.

‘You two didn’t think of this before you broke into the tower and started waving guns around?’ asked Professor Chakravarti.

‘We were a bit distracted,’ said Robin, embarrassed.

‘We – really, we were making it up as we went along,’ said Victoire. ‘And we didn’t have much time.’

‘Planning a revolution is not one of your strong suits.’ Professor Craft sniffed. ‘I shall see what I can do with the oats.’

Very soon a number of other problems arose. Babel was blessed with running water and indoor lavatories, but there was no place to shower. No one had an extra change of clothes, and there were of course no laundering facilities – all of them had their washing done by invisible scouts. Apart from a single cot on the eighth floor, which was used as an unofficial nap space by the graduate fellows, there were no beds, pillows, linens, or anything that might make for comfortable bedding at night except for their own coats.

‘Think of it like this,’ Professor Chakravarti said in a valiant attempt to lift their mood. ‘Who doesn’t dream of living in a library? Is there not a certain romance to our situation? Who among us would balk at a completely unhindered life of the mind?’

No one, it seemed, shared this fantasy.

‘Can’t we just duck out in the evenings?’ asked Juliana. ‘We can sneak out past midnight and be back by morning, no one will notice—’

‘That’s absurd,’ said Robin. ‘This isn’t some kind of – of optional daytime activity—’

‘We’re going to smell,’ said Yusuf. ‘It’ll be disgusting.’

‘Still, we can’t just keep going in and out—’

‘Just once then,’ said Ibrahim. ‘Just for supplies—’