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

These effects would not be fully felt for months. There were still regional silver-working centres in London, Liverpool, Edinburgh, and Birmingham, where Babel scholars who hadn’t dazzled enough during their undergraduate years to win fellowships eked out a mundane living fiddling with the bars invented by their more talented peers. These centres would function as a stopgap in the interim. But they could not fully make up the deficit – especially since, crucially, they did not have access to the same maintenance ledgers.

‘Don’t you think they’ll remember?’ asked Robin. ‘At least, the scholars who walked out with Professor Playfair?’

‘They’re academics,’ said Professor Craft. ‘All we know is the life of the mind. We don’t remember anything unless it’s written in our diaries and circled several times over. Jerome will do his very best, supposing he’s not still drugged up from surgery, but too much will slip through the cracks. This country’s going to pieces in months.’

‘And the economy is going to fail even more quickly than that,’ said Yusuf, who, alone among them, actually knew something about markets and banking. ‘It’s all the speculation, see – people have been going mad buying shares in railways and other silver-powered industries in the past decade because they all think they’re on the verge of getting rich. What happens when they realize all those shares will come to naught? The rail industry might take months to falter. The markets themselves will fail in weeks.’

Market failure. The thought was absurd, yet tantalizing. Could they win this with the threat of a stock market collapse and the inevitable bank run?

For that was the key, wasn’t it? For this to work, they had to frighten the rich and powerful. They knew the strike would have a disproportionate impact on the working poor; those living in the dirtiest, most crowded parts of London, who could not simply pack up and escape to the country when their air blackened and their water grew foul. But in another important sense, silver scarcity would most acutely hit those who had the most to gain from its development. The newest buildings – the private clubs, the dance halls, the freshly renovated theatres – would collapse first. London’s shabby tenements were built from ordinary lumber, not foundations enhanced by silver to support weight much heavier than natural materials could. The architect Augustus Pugin was a frequent collaborator of Babel’s faculty, and had made great use of silver bars in his recent projects – Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire, the Alton Towers renovation, and most notably, the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster after the 1834 fire. According to the work-order ledgers, all these buildings would fail by the end of the year. Sooner, if the right rods were pulled away.

How would London’s wealthy respond when the ground gave way beneath their feet?

The strikers gave fair warning. They loudly advertised this information. They wrote endless pamphlets, which Abel communicated to associates in London. Your roads will fail, they wrote. Your water will run dry. Your lights will go dark, your food will rot, and your ships sink. All this will come to pass, unless you choose peace.

‘It’s like the Ten Plagues,’ Victoire observed.

Robin had not cracked open a Bible in years. ‘The Ten Plagues?’

‘Moses asked Pharaoh to let his people go,’ said Victoire. ‘But Pharaoh’s heart was unyielding, and he refused. So the Lord cast ten plagues on the Pharaoh’s land. He turned the Nile to blood. He sent locusts, frogs, and pestilence. He cast all of Egypt into darkness, and through these feats he made Pharaoh know his power.’

‘And did Pharaoh let them go?’ Robin asked.

‘He did,’ said Victoire. ‘But only after the tenth plague. Only after he had suffered the death of his firstborn son.’

Occasionally the effects of the strike reversed themselves. Sometimes the lights would flicker back on for a night, or a patchwork of roads would clear up, or news would spread that clean water silver-work was now available and selling at exorbitant prices in certain neighbourhoods of London. Occasionally the disaster the ledgers predicted did not come to pass.

This was not a surprise. The exiled scholars – Professor De Vreese, Professor Harding, and all the faculty and fellows who had not remained in the tower – had regrouped in London and established a defence society to counteract the strikers. The country now lay in the throes of an invisible battle of words and meaning; its fate teetered between the university centre and the desperate, striving periphery.

The strikers were not concerned. The exiles could not win; they simply lacked the tower’s resources. They could stick their fingers in the mud. They could not stop the river from flowing, nor the dam from bursting.