Page 171 of Babel

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.