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

Victoire folded her arms. Robin didn’t like the way her eyes were searching him, as though she’d seized on some truth that he didn’t want to admit out loud.

‘It’s not revenge, what we’re doing here.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Just so we’re clear.’

He chose not to mention Professor Playfair then. ‘I know that, Victoire.’

‘Fine, then.’ She nodded curtly. ‘Two dozen.’

‘Two dozen to start.’ Robin reached down and pulled the nearest resonance rod from its fixture. It slid out with surprising ease. He’d expected some resistance, some noise or transformation symbolizing the break. ‘Is it that simple?’

How slender, how fragile, the foundations of an empire. Take away the centre, and what’s left? A gasping periphery, baseless, powerless, cut down at the roots.

Victoire reached out at random and pulled out a second rod, and then a third. ‘I suppose we’ll see.’

And then, like a house of cards, Oxford began to crumble.

The rapidity of its deterioration was stunning. The next day, all the bell-tower clocks stopped running, all frozen at precisely 6.37 in the morning. Later that afternoon, a great stink wafted over the city. It turned out silver had been used to facilitate the flow of sewage, which was now stuck in place, an unmoving mass of sludge. That evening, Oxford went dark. First one lamp-post started flickering, then another, and then another, until all of the lights on High Street went out. For the first time in the two decades since gas lamps were installed on its streets, Oxford passed the night shrouded in black.

‘What did you two do up there?’ Ibrahim marvelled.

‘We only took out two dozen,’ said Victoire. ‘Two dozen only, so how—’

‘This is how Babel was designed to work,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘We made the city as reliant on the Institute as possible. We designed bars to last for only several weeks instead of months, because maintenance appointments bring in money. This is the cost of inflating prices and artificially creating demand. It all works beautifully, until it doesn’t.’

By the morning of the third day, transportation began breaking down. Most of the carts in England used a variety of match-pairs that played with the concept of speed. The word speed in modern English was specific to a sense of rapidity, but as a number of common phrases –

Godspeed, good speed to you – proved, the root meaning, deriving with the Latin spēs, meaning ‘to hope’, was associated with good fortune and success, with the broader sense of seeking one’s destination, of crossing great distances to reach one’s goal. Speed-based match-pairs using Latin, or in rare cases Old Slavic, allowed carriages to travel more quickly without risk of accident.

But drivers had become too accustomed to the bars, and thus did not correct for when they failed. Accidents multiplied. Oxford’s roads became blocked with overturned wagons and cabs that had taken corners too tightly. Up in the Cotswolds a small family of eight tumbled straight into a ravine because the driver had got used to sitting back and letting the horses take over during tricky turns.

The postal system, too, ground to a halt. For years, Royal Mail couriers with particularly heavy loads had been using bars engraved with the French-English match-pair parcelle

-parcel. Both French and English had once used parcel to refer to pieces of land that made up an estate, but when it evolved to imply an item of business in both, it retained its connotation of small fragmentariness in French, whereas in English it simply meant a package. Fixing this bar to the postal carriage made the parcels seem a fraction of their true weight. But now these carriages, with horses straining under three times the load they were used to, were collapsing mid-route.

‘Do you think they’ve caught on yet that this is a problem?’ Robin demanded on the fourth day. ‘I mean, how long is it going to take for people to realize this won’t just go away on its own?’

But it was impossible to tell from within the tower. They had no way to gauge public opinion in either Oxford or London, except through the papers which, hilariously, were still delivered to the front door every morning. This was how they learned about the Cotswold family tragedy, the traffic accidents, and the countrywide courier slowdown. But the London papers made hardly any mention of the war on China or the strike, save for a brief announcement about some ‘internal disturbances’ at the ‘prestigious Royal Institute of Translation’.

‘We’re being silenced,’ Victoire said grimly. ‘They’re doing this on purpose.’