Page 132 of Babel

‘We think they do. We’re trying to track the number of languages still spoken around the world, and where they’re dying out. And there are a good deal of languages which are dying, you know. A great extinction event began the day Christopher Columbus set foot in the New World. Spanish, Portuguese, French, English – they’ve been edging out regional languages and dialects like cuckoo chicks. I think it’s not inconceivable that one day, most of the world will speak only English.’ She sighed, looking up at the map. ‘I was born a generation too late. It’s not so long ago that I might have grown up around Gaelic.’

‘But that would destroy silver-working,’ said Robin. ‘Wouldn’t it? It’d collapse the linguistic landscape. There would be nothing to translate. No differences to distort.’

‘But that’s the great contradiction of colonialism.’ Cathy uttered this like a simple matter of fact. ‘It’s built to destroy that which it prizes most.’

‘Come on, you two.’ Anthony waved them over to a doorway, which led to a small reading room that had been converted into a dining room. ‘Let’s eat.’

The offerings at dinner were global – a vegetable curry, a platter of boiled potatoes, a fried fish dish that tasted startlingly similar to a kind Robin had once eaten in Canton, and a flat, chewy bread that paired well with everything else. The eight of them sat around a very fine ornamented table that looked incongruous against the plain wooden panels. There weren’t enough chairs for all of them, so Anthony and Ilse had dragged over benches and sitting stools from around the library. None of the tableware matched, nor the silverware. Flames burned merrily from a fireplace in the corner, heating the room unevenly so that Robin’s left side dripped sweat while his right side felt chilly. The whole scene was quintessentially collegial.

‘Is it just you lot?’ Robin asked.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Vimal.

‘Well, you’re...’ Robin gestured around the table. ‘You’re all very young.’

‘Necessarily,’ said Anthony. ‘It’s dangerous business.’

‘But aren’t there – I don’t know—’

‘Proper adults? Reinforcements?’ Anthony nodded. ‘Some, yes. They’re scattered across the globe. I don’t know who they all are – not one of us knows exhaustively who they all are, and that’s intentional. There are probably even Hermes associates at Babel I’m still not aware of, though whoever they are, I hope they start making a bit more of an effort.’

‘That, and attrition’s a problem,’ said Ilse. ‘Take Burma.’

‘What happened in Burma?’ asked Robin.

‘Sterling Jones happened,’ Anthony said tightly, but did not elaborate.

This seemed a sensitive topic. For a moment, everyone stared at their food.

Robin thought of the two thieves he’d met his first night at Oxford, the young woman and the blond-haired man, neither of whom he’d ever seen again. He did not venture to ask. He knew the answer: attrition.

‘But how do you get anything done?’ asked Ramy. ‘That is, if you don’t even know who your allies are?’

‘Well, it’s not so different from Oxford bureaucracy,’ Anthony said. ‘The university, the colleges, and the faculties never seem to agree on who’s in charge of what, but they get things done, don’t they?’

‘Langue de bœuf sauce Madère,’ Cathy announced, setting a heavy pot in the centre of the table. ‘Beef tongue in Madeira sauce.’

‘Cathy loves to serve tongue,’ Vimal informed them. ‘She thinks it’s funny.’

‘She’s creating a dictionary of tongues,’ said Anthony. ‘Boiled tongue, pickled tongue, dried tongue, smoked—’

‘Shush.’ Cathy slid onto the bench in between them. ‘Tongue’s my favourite cut.’

‘It’s the cheapest cut,’ said Ilse.

‘It’s disgusting,’ said Anthony.

Cathy flung a potato at him. ‘Fill up on these, then.’

‘Ah, pommes de terre à l’anglaise.’ Anthony speared a potato with his fork. ‘You know why the French called boiled potatoes à l’anglaise? Because they think boiling things is boring, Cathy, just like all of English cooking is deathly boring—’

‘Then don’t eat them, Anthony.’

‘Roast them,’ Anthony persisted. ‘Braise them with butter, or bake them with a cheese – just don’t be so English.’

Watching them, Robin felt a sharp prickle at the base of his nose. He felt the same as he had the night of the commemoration ball, dancing on the tables under the fairy lights. How magical, he thought; how impossible, that a place like this could exist, a distillation of all that Babel promised. He felt he’d been looking for a place like this all his life, and still he’d betrayed it.

To his horror, he began to cry.