Page 160 of Babel

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The seed ye sow, another reaps;

The wealth ye find, another keeps;

The robes ye weave, another wears;

The arms ye forge, another bears.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, ‘Song to the Men of England’

The mood that afternoon was one of nervous apprehension. Like children who had kicked over an ants’ nest, they now watched fearfully to see how awful the ramifications would be. Hours had passed. Surely the escaped professors had liaised with city policy-makers by now. Surely London had read those pamphlets by now. What form would the backlash take? They had all spent years trusting in the impenetrability of the tower; its wards, until now, had shielded them from everything. Still, it felt as if they were counting down the minutes to a vicious retaliation.

‘They have to send in the constables,’ said Professor Craft. ‘Even if they can’t get in. There will be some attempted arrest, surely. If not for the strike, then for—’ She glanced at Victoire, blinked, and trailed off.

There was a brief silence.

‘The strike is illegal too,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘The Combination of Workmen Act of 1825 suppresses the right to strike by trade unions and guilds.’

‘We’re not a guild, though,’ said Robin.

‘Actually, we are,’ said Yusuf, who worked in Legal. ‘It’s in the founding documents. Babel alums and students comprise the Translators’ Guild by virtue of their institutional affiliation, so by holding a strike we are in violation of the law, if you want to get technical about it.’

They looked round at each other, and then all at once burst out laughing.

But their good humour faded quickly. The association between their strike and the trade unions left a bad taste in all of their mouths, for the workers’ agitations of the 1830s – brought about directly as the result of the silver industrial revolution – had met with resounding failure. The Luddites had ended up either dead or exiled to Australia. The Lancashire spinners were forced back to work to avoid starvation within a year. The Swing Rioters, by smashing threshing machines and setting barns on fire, had secured a temporary improvement in wages and working conditions, but these were promptly reneged upon; more than a dozen rioters were hanged, and hundreds were sent to penal colonies in Australia.

Strikers in this country never won broad public support, for the public merely wanted all the conveniences of modern life without the guilt of knowing how those conveniences were procured. And why should the translators succeed where other strikers – white strikers, no less – had failed?

There was at least one reason to hope. They were running on momentum. The social forces that had prompted the Luddites to smash machines had not disappeared. They had only grown worse. Silver-powered looms and spinning machines were getting cheaper and more ubiquitous, enriching none but factory owners and financiers. Each year they put more men out of work, left more families destitute, and maimed and killed more children in machines that operated more quickly than the human eye could track. The use of silver created inequality, and both had increased exponentially in England during the past decade. The country was pulling apart at the seams. This could not go on forever.

And their strike, Robin was convinced, was different. Their impact was larger, harder to patch over. There were no alternatives to Babel, no scabs. No one else could do what they did. Britain could not function without them. If Parliament did not believe it, then they would soon learn.

Still no policemen had appeared by evening. This lack of response baffled them. But soon logistical problems – namely, supplies and accommodation – became the more pressing matters at hand. It was clear now that they were going to be in the tower for quite some time, with no clear end date to their strike. At some point they were going to run out of food.

There was a tiny, rarely used kitchen in the basement, where servants had once lived before the Institute stopped housing its janitorial staff for free. Occasionally scholars ducked downstairs for a snack when working late. A foray into the cabinets produced a decent amount of nonperishables – nuts, preserves, indestructible tea biscuits, and dry oats for porridge. It wasn’t much, but they wouldn’t starve overnight. And they found many, many bottles of wine, left over from years of faculty functions and garden parties.

‘Absolutely not,’ said Professor Craft when Juliana and Meghana proposed bringing the bottles upstairs. ‘Put those back. We need to keep our wits about us.’

‘We need something to pass the time,’ said Meghana. ‘And if we’re going to starve to death, we may as well go out drunk.’

‘They’re not going to starve us to death,’ Robin said. ‘They can’t allow us to die. They can’t hurt us. That’s the point.’

‘Even so,’ said Yusuf. ‘We’ve just declared our intention to break the city. I don’t think we can just wander out for a hot breakfast, do you?’

Nor could they simply poke their heads outside and put in an order to the grocer’s. They had no friends in town, no one who could act as their liaison with the outer world. Professor Craft had a brother in Reading, but there was no way of getting a letter to him, and nor was there a safe way for him to deliver foodstuffs up to the tower. And Professor Chakravarti, it turned out, had a very limited relationship with Hermes – he’d been recruited only after his promotion to junior faculty, after his ties to upper faculty rendered him too risky for deeper involvement – and he knew Hermes only through anonymous letters and drop points. No one else had responded to their beacon. As far as they knew, they were the only ones left.

‘You two didn’t think of this before you broke into the tower and started waving guns around?’ asked Professor Chakravarti.

‘We were a bit distracted,’ said Robin, embarrassed.

‘We – really, we were making it up as we went along,’ said Victoire. ‘And we didn’t have much time.’

‘Planning a revolution is not one of your strong suits.’ Professor Craft sniffed. ‘I shall see what I can do with the oats.’

Very soon a number of other problems arose. Babel was blessed with running water and indoor lavatories, but there was no place to shower. No one had an extra change of clothes, and there were of course no laundering facilities – all of them had their washing done by invisible scouts. Apart from a single cot on the eighth floor, which was used as an unofficial nap space by the graduate fellows, there were no beds, pillows, linens, or anything that might make for comfortable bedding at night except for their own coats.

‘Think of it like this,’ Professor Chakravarti said in a valiant attempt to lift their mood. ‘Who doesn’t dream of living in a library? Is there not a certain romance to our situation? Who among us would balk at a completely unhindered life of the mind?’