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‘A dozen or so, do you think?’ Victoire suggested. ‘A dozen every day, and we’ll see if we need to scale up?’
‘Perhaps two dozen to start,’ said Robin. There must have been hundreds of rods in the room. He had the impulse to kick them all down, to just grab one and use it to bat down the others. ‘Don’t we want to be dramatic?’
Victoire shot him a droll look. ‘There’s dramatic, and then there’s reckless.’
‘This whole endeavour is reckless.’
‘But we don’t even know what one would do—’
‘I only mean, we need to get their attention.’ Robin pressed a fist into a palm. ‘I want a spectacle. I want Armageddon. I want them to think that a dozen Magdalen Towers will fall every day until they listen to us.’
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 spes, 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.’
But how long did Parliament think it could keep things quiet? On the fifth morning, they were woken by a horribly discordant noise. It took some rooting through the ledgers to find out what was going on. Great Tom of Christ Church, the loudest bell in Oxford, had always sung a slightly imperfect B-flat note. But whatever silver-work regulated its sound had stopped working, and Great Tom now blared a devastating, eerie groan. By that afternoon, it was joined by the bells at St Martin’s, St Mary’s, and Osney Abbey, an ongoing, miserable, groaning chorus.
Babel’s wards blocked out the sound somewhat, though by that evening they’d all learned to live with a constant, dreadful murmur seeping through the walls. They wore cotton in their ears to sleep.
The bells were a funeral dirge to an illusion. The city of dreaming spires was no longer. Oxford’s degradation was visible – one could see it crumbling by the hour like a rotting gingerbread house. What became clear was how deeply Oxford relied on silver, how without the constant labour of its translation corps, of the talent it attracted from abroad, it immediately fell apart. It revealed more than the power of translation. It revealed the sheer dependence of the British, who, astonishingly, could not manage to do basic things like bake bread or get safely from one place to another without words stolen from other countries.
And still this was only the beginning. The maintenance ledgers were endless, and there were hundreds of resonance rods yet to be uprooted.
‘How far are they going to let this go?’ was the question they kept asking inside the tower. For they were all amazed, and somewhat horrified, that the city had still not acknowledged the real reason behind this strike; that Parliament had still not taken action.
Privately, Robin did not want this to end. He would never confess it to the others, but deep down, where the ghosts of Griffin and Ramy resided, he did not want a speedy resolution, a nominal settlement that only papered over decades of exploitation.
