Babel, page 57
Very soon the effects of their strike became deadly.* One of the major breaking points, it turned out, was the roads. In Oxford, but even more so in London, traffic was the dominant problem facing city officials – how to manage the flow of carts, horses, pedestrians, stagecoaches, hackney carriages, and wagons without gridlock or accidents. Silver-work had kept pile-ups at bay by reinforcing wooden roads, regulating turnpikes, reinforcing toll gates and bridges, ensuring smooth turns by carts, replenishing the water pumps meant for suppressing dust, and keeping horses docile. Without Babel maintenance, all of these minute adjustments began to fail one by one, and dozens died as a result.
Transportation tipped the domino that led to a slew of other miseries. Grocers could not stock their shelves. Bakers could not obtain flour. Doctors could not see their patients. Solicitors could not make it to court. A dozen carriages in London’s richer neighbourhoods had made use of a match-pair by Professor Lovell that played on the Chinese character 輔 (fǔ), which meant ‘to help’ or ‘to assist’. The character had originally referred to the protective sidebars on a carriage. Professor Lovell had been due in London to touch them up mid-January. The bars failed. The carriages were now too dangerous to drive.*
Everything they knew would transpire in London was already happening in Oxford, for Oxford, by proximity to Babel, was the most silver-reliant city in the world. And Oxford was rotting. Its people were going broke, they were hungry, their trades had been interrupted, their rivers were blocked up, their markets had shut down. They sent out to London for food and supplies, but the roads had become perilous, and the Oxford-to-Paddington line was no longer running.
The attacks on the tower redoubled. Townspeople and soldiers together crowded the streets, shouting obscenities at the windows, skirmishing with men at the barricades. But it made no difference. They could not hurt the translators, who were the only people who could end their misery. They could not get past the tower’s wards, could not burn it down or set explosives at its base. They could only beg the scholars to stop.
We only have two demands, Robin wrote in a series of pamphlets, which had become his way of responding to the town’s outcries. Parliament knows this. Refusal to go to war, and amnesty. Your fate lies in their hands.
He requested that London capitulate before all these things came to pass. He hoped, and knew, they would not. He had fully converted now to Griffin’s theory of violence, that the oppressor would never sit down at the negotiating table when they still thought they had nothing to lose. No; things had to get bloody. Until now, all threats had been hypothetical. London had to suffer to learn.
Victoire did not like this. Every time they ascended to the eighth floor, they quarrelled over which resonance bars to pull out, and how many. He wanted to deactivate two dozen; she wanted only two. Usually, they settled on five or six.
‘You’re pushing things too fast,’ she said. ‘You haven’t even given them a chance to respond.’
‘They can respond whenever they like,’ said Robin. ‘What’s stopping them? Meanwhile, the Army’s already here—’
‘The Army’s here because you pushed them to it.’
He made an impatient noise. ‘I’m sorry I won’t be squeamish—’
‘I’m not being squeamish; I’m being prudent.’ Victoire folded her arms. ‘It’s too fast, Robin. It’s too much all at once. You need to let the debates settle. You need to let public opinion turn against the war—’
‘It’s not enough,’ he insisted. ‘They won’t reason themselves into justice now when they never have before. Fear’s the only thing that works. This is just tactics—’
‘This is not coming from tactics.’ Her voice sharpened. ‘It’s coming from grief.’
He couldn’t turn around. He didn’t want her to see his expression. ‘You said yourself you wanted this place to burn.’
‘But even more,’ said Victoire, placing a hand on his shoulder, ‘I want us to survive.’
It was impossible to say, in the end, how much of a difference the pace of their destruction really made. The choice remained with Parliament. The debates continued in London.
No one knew what was going on inside the House of Lords, except that neither the Whigs nor the Radicals felt good enough about their numbers yet to call a vote. The papers revealed more about public sentiment. The mainstream rags expressed the opinion Robin had expected, which was that the war on China was a matter of defending national pride, that invasion was nothing more than a just punishment for the indignities imposed by the Chinese on the British flag, that the occupation of Babel by foreign-born students was an act of treason, that the barricades in Oxford and the strikes in London were the work of brutish malcontents, and that the government ought to hold firm against their demands. Prowar editorials stressed the ease with which China would be defeated. It would only be a little war, and not even a proper war at that; all it took was the ignition of several cannons and the Chinese would admit defeat within a day.
The papers could not seem to make up their minds about the translators. The prowar publications offered a dozen theories. They were in cahoots with the corrupt Chinese government. They were co-conspirators of mutineers in India. They were malicious ingrates with no agenda at all except a desire to hurt England, to bite the hand that had fed them – and this required no further explanation, for it was a motive that the British public were all too ready to believe. We will not negotiate with Babel, promised members of Parliament on both sides. Britain does not bow to foreigners.*
Yet not all the papers were against Babel or for the war. Indeed, for every headline that urged swift action in Canton, there was another by a publication (albeit smaller, more niche, more radical) that called the war a moral and religious outrage. The Spectator accused the prowar party of greed and profiteering; the Examiner called the war criminal and indefensible. JARDINE’S OPIUM WAR A DISGRACE, read one headline by the Champion. Others were not so tactful: DRUGGY MCDRUGGY WANTS HIS THUMBS IN CHINA read the Political Register.
Every social faction in England had an opinion. The abolitionists put out statements of support for the strikers. So too did the suffragists, though not quite so loudly. Christian organizations printed pamphlets criticizing the spread of an illegal vice to an innocent people, though the prowar evangelists responded with the supposedly Christian argument that it would in fact be God’s work to expose the Chinese people to free trade.
Meanwhile, Radical publications made the argument that the opening up of China was antithetical to the interests of workers in northern England. The Chartists, a movement of disillusioned industrial and artisanal workers, came out most strongly in support of the strikers; the Chartist circular The Red Republican, in fact, put out a headline calling the translators heroes of the working class.
This gave Robin hope. The Radicals were, after all, the party that the Whigs needed to appease, and if such headlines could convince the Radicals that war was not in their long-term interests, then perhaps all this could be resolved.
And indeed, the conversation about the dangers of silver-work had fared better in the court of public opinion than did the conversation about China. Here was an issue that was close to home, that affected the average Briton in ways he could understand. The silver industrial revolution had decimated both the textile and agricultural industries. The papers ran piece after piece exposing the horrific working conditions inside silver-powered factories (although these had their rebuttals, including one refutation by Andrew Ure, who argued that factory workers would feel a good deal better if they only consumed less gin and tobacco). In 1833, the surgeon Peter Gaskell had published a thoroughly researched manuscript entitled The Manufacturing Population of England, focusing chiefly on the moral, social, and physical toll of silver-working machinery on British labourers. It had gone largely unheeded at the time, except by the Radicals, who were known to exaggerate everything. Now, the antiwar papers ran excerpts from it every day, reporting in grisly detail the coal dust inhaled by small children forced to wriggle into tunnels that adults could not, the fingers and toes lost to silver-powered machines working at inhuman speeds, the girls who’d been strangled by their own hair caught in whirring spindles and looms.
The Spectator printed a cartoon illustration of emaciated children being crushed to death under the wheels of some nebulous contraption, which they captioned WHITE SLAVES OF THE SILVER REVOLUTION. In the tower, they laughed themselves silly over this comparison, but the general public seemed genuinely horrified. Someone asked a member of the House of Lords why he supported exploiting children in factories; he replied quite flippantly that employing children under the age of nine had been outlawed in 1833, which led to more general outcry over the suffering of ten- and eleven-year-olds in the country.
‘Is it really as bad as all that?’ Robin asked Abel. ‘The factories, I mean.’
‘Worse,’ said Abel. ‘Those are just the freak accidents they’re reporting on. But they don’t say what it’s like to work day after day on those cramped floors. Rising before dawn and working until nine with few breaks in between. And those are the conditions we covet. The jobs we wish we could get back. I imagine they don’t make you work half as hard at university, do they?’
‘No,’ said Robin, feeling embarrassed. ‘They don’t.’
The Spectator story seemed to greatly affect Professor Craft in particular. Robin found her sitting with it at the tea table, red in the eyes, long after the others had finished their breakfast. She hastily wiped her eyes with a handkerchief when she saw him approach.
He sat down beside her. ‘Are you all right, Professor?’
‘Oh, yes.’ She cleared her throat, paused, then nudged the paper. ‘It’s just . . . it’s a side of the story we don’t often think about, isn’t it?’
‘I think we all got good at choosing not to think about certain things.’
She seemed not to hear him. She stared out of the window at the green below, where the strikers’ protest grounds had been turned into what looked like a military camp. ‘My first patented match-pair improved the efficiency of equipment at a mine in Tyneshire,’ she said. ‘It kept coal-laden trolleys firmly on their tracks. The mine owners were so impressed they invited me up for a visit, and of course I went; I was so excited about contributing something to the country. I remember being shocked at all the little children in the pits. When I asked, the miners said that they were completely safe, and that helping out in the mines kept them from trouble when their parents were at work.’
She took a shaky breath. ‘Later they told me that the silver-work made the trolleys impossible to move off the tracks, even when there were people in the way. There was an accident. One little boy lost both his legs. They stopped using the match-pair when they couldn’t figure out a workaround, but I didn’t give it a second thought. By then I’d received my fellowship. I had a professorship in sight, and I’d moved on to other, bigger projects. I didn’t think about it. I simply didn’t think about it, for years, and years and years.’
She turned back towards him. Her eyes were wet. ‘Only it builds up, doesn’t it? It doesn’t just disappear. And one day you start prodding at what you’ve suppressed. And it’s a mass of black rot, and it’s endless, horrifying, and you can’t look away.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Robin.
Victoire glanced up. ‘What is it?’
They were holed up in an office on the sixth floor, poring through the ledgers to find portents of future disasters. They’d already been through the Oxford town appointments up to the next year. London’s maintenance schedules were harder to find – Babel’s bookkeeping was astonishingly bad, and the categorization system used by its clerks seemed not to be organized by date, which would have been logical, or by language, which would have made less but at least some sense, but by the postal code of the London neighbourhood in question.
Robin tapped his ledger. ‘I think we might be close to a breaking point.’
‘Why?’
‘They’re due for maintenance on Westminster Bridge in a week. They contracted for silver-work at the same time that the New London Bridge was built in 1825, and the bars were meant to expire after fifteen years. That’s now.’
‘So what happens?’ asked Victoire. ‘The turnstiles lock in?’
‘I don’t think so, it was quite a major . . . F is code for foundation, isn’t it?’ Robin trailed off, then fell silent. His eyes darted up and down the ledger, trying to confirm what was in front of him. It was quite a large entry, a list of silver bars and match-pairs in various languages that stretched nearly half a page. A good number of them had corresponding numbers in a subsequent column – an indication they employed resonance links. He turned the page, then blinked. The column continued over the next two pages. ‘I think it just falls right into the river.’
Victoire leaned back and exhaled very slowly, deflating.
The implications were enormous. Westminster Bridge was not the only bridge to cross the Thames, but it saw the heaviest traffic. And if Westminster Bridge fell into the river, then no steamers, no houseboats, no sculls or canoes would be able to get around the wreckage. If Westminster Bridge went down, the whole city stopped moving.
And in the weeks to come, when the bars that kept the Thames clean of sewage and pollution from gas factories and chemical works at last expired, the waters would revert to a state of diseased and putrid fermentation. Fish would float belly-up to the surface, dead and stinking. Urine and feces, already moving sluggishly through sewer drains, would solidify.
Egypt would suffer her ten plagues.
But as Robin explained this, Victoire’s face mirrored none of his glee. Rather, she was looking at him with a very odd expression, brows furrowed and lips pursed, and it turned his insides with discomfort.
‘It’s Armageddon,’ he insisted, spreading his hands in the air. How could he make her see? ‘It’s the worst possible thing that could happen.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Except once you’ve played it, we’ve nothing left.’
‘We won’t need anything else,’ he said. ‘We only need to turn the screws once, to push them to the limit—’
‘A limit you know they’ll ignore? Please, Robin—’
‘Then what’s the alternative? Defanging ourselves?’
‘It’s giving them time, it’s letting them see the consequences—’
‘What more is there to see?’ He had not meant to yell. He took a deep breath. ‘Victoire, please, I just think we need to escalate, otherwise—’
‘I think you want it to fall,’ she accused. ‘I think this is just retribution for you, because you want to see it fall.’
‘And why not?’
They’d had this argument before. The ghosts of Anthony and Griffin loomed between them: one guided by the conviction that the enemy would at least act in rational self-interest, if not altruism, and the other guided less by conviction, less by telos, and more by sheer, untrammelled rage.
‘I know it hurts.’ Victoire’s throat pulsed. ‘I know – I know it feels impossible to move on. But your motivating goal cannot be to join Ramy.’
A silence. Robin considered denying this. But there was no point lying to Victoire, or to himself.
‘Doesn’t it kill you?’ His voice broke. ‘Knowing what they’ve done? Seeing their faces? I can’t imagine a world where we coexist with them. Doesn’t it split you apart?’
‘Of course it does,’ she cried. ‘But that’s no excuse not to keep living.’
‘I’m not trying to die.’
‘What do you think making this bridge collapse does, then? What do you think they’ll do to us?’
‘What would you do?’ he asked. ‘End this strike? Open up the tower?’
‘If I tried,’ she said, ‘could you stop me?’
They both stared at the ledger. Neither of them spoke for a very long time. They did not want to follow this conversation where it might lead. Neither of them could bear any more heartbreak.
‘A vote,’ Robin proposed at last, unable to take this any longer. ‘We can’t – we can’t just break the strike like this. It’s not up to us. Let’s not decide, Victoire.’
Victoire’s shoulders sagged. He saw such sorrow on her face. She lifted her chin, and for a moment he thought she might argue further, but all she did then was nod.
The vote came out narrowly in Robin’s favour. Victoire and the professors were against; all the students were for. The students agreed with Robin that they had to push Parliament to the breaking point, but they were not thrilled about it. Ibrahim and Juliana both hugged their arms against their chest as they voted, as if shrinking from the idea. Even Yusuf, who usually took great pleasure in helping Robin compose threatening pamphlets to London, stared down at his feet.
‘So that’s that,’ said Robin. He’d won, but it did not feel like such a victory. He could not meet Victoire’s eye.
‘When does this happen?’ Professor Chakravarti asked.
‘This Saturday,’ Robin said. ‘The timing’s marvellous.’
‘But Parliament isn’t going to capitulate by Saturday.’
‘Then I suppose we’ll hear about the bridge when it’s collapsed.’
‘And you are comfortable with this?’ Professor Chakravarti glanced about, as if trying to gauge the moral temperature of the room. ‘Dozens of people will die. There are whole crowds there trying to get on boats at all times of day; what happens when—’
‘That’s not our choice,’ said Robin. ‘It’s theirs. It’s inaction. It’s killing by letting die. We’re not even touching the resonance rods, it’s going to fall on its own—’
‘You know very well that doesn’t matter,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘Don’t mince the ethics. Westminster Bridge falling down is your choice. But innocent people can’t determine the whims of Parliament.’
