Page 35 of Babel

Robin took in Griffin’s lean, underfed frame, his frayed black coat, and his unkempt hair. No – he had to admit, the Hermes Society did not seem like a scheme for personal profit. Perhaps Griffin was using the stolen silver for some other secret means, but personal gain did not seem like one of them.

‘I know it’s a lot at once,’ Griffin said. ‘But you’ve simply got to trust me. There’s no other way.’

‘I want to. I mean – I’m just – this is so much.’ Robin shook his head. ‘I’ve only just arrived here, I’ve only just seen Babel for the first time, and I don’t know you or this place well enough to have the slightest idea what’s going on—’

‘Then why’d you do it?’ Griffin asked.

‘I – what?’

‘Last night.’ Griffin cast him a sideways look. ‘You helped us, without question. You didn’t even hesitate. Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ Robin said truthfully.

He’d asked himself this a thousand times. Why had he activated that bar? It wasn’t merely because the whole situation – the midnight hour, the moonlight glow – had been so dreamlike that rules and consequences seemed to disappear, or because the sight of his doppelgänger had made him doubt reality itself. He’d felt some deeper compulsion he couldn’t explain. ‘It just seemed right.’

‘What, you didn’t realize you were helping a ring of thieves?’

‘I knew you were thieves,’ Robin said. ‘I just... I didn’t think you were doing anything wrong.’

‘I’d trust your instinct on that,’ said Griffin. ‘Trust me. Trust that we’re doing the right thing.’

‘And what is the right thing?’ Robin asked. ‘In your view? What’s all this for?’

Griffin smiled. It was a peculiar, condescending smile, a mask of amusement that didn’t reach his eyes. ‘Now you’re asking the right questions.’

They’d looped back round to Banbury Road. The University Parks loomed lush before them, and Robin half hoped they would cut south to Parks Road – it was getting late, and the night was quite cold – but Griffin took them north, further from the city centre.

‘Do you know what the majority of bars are used for in this country?’

Robin took a wild guess. ‘Doctors’ practices?’

‘Ha. Adorable. No, they’re used for sitting room decorations. That’s right – alarm clocks that sound like real roosters, lights that dim and brighten on vocal demand, curtains that change colour throughout the day, that sort of thing. Because they’re fun, and because the British upper class can afford them, and whatever rich Britons want, they get.’

‘Fine,’ said Robin. ‘But just because Babel sells bars to meet popular demand—’

Griffin cut him off. ‘Would you like to know the second and third largest sources of income at Babel?’

‘Legal?’

‘No. Militaries, both state and private,’ said Griffin. ‘And then slave traders. Legal makes pennies in comparison.’

‘That’s... that’s impossible.’

‘No, that’s just how the world works. Let me paint you a picture, brother. You’ve noticed by now that London sits at the centre of a vast empire that won’t stop growing. The single most important enabler of this growth is Babel. Babel collects foreign languages and foreign talent the same way it hoards silver and uses them to produce translation magic that benefits England and England only. The vast majority of all silver bars in use in the world are in London. The newest, most powerful bars in use rely on Chinese, Sanskrit, and Arabic to work, but you’ll count less than a thousand bars in the countries where those languages are widely spoken, and then only in the homes of the wealthy and powerful. And that’s wrong. That’s predatory. That’s fundamentally unjust.’

Griffin had a habit of crisply punctuating each sentence with an open hand, like a conductor bearing down again and again over the same note. ‘But how does this happen?’ he continued. ‘How does all the power from foreign languages just somehow accrue to England? This is no accident; this is a deliberate exploitation of foreign culture and foreign resources. The professors like to pretend that the tower is a refuge for pure knowledge, that it sits above the mundane concerns of business and commerce, but it does not. It’s intricately tied to the business of colonialism. It is the business of colonialism. Ask yourself why the Literature Department only translates works into English and not the other way around, or what the interpreters are being sent abroad to do. Everything Babel does is in the service of expanding the Empire. Consider – Sir Horace Wilson, who’s the first endowed chair in Sanskrit in Oxford history, spends half his time conducting tutorials for Christian missionaries.

‘The point of it all is to keep amassing silver. We possess all this silver because we cajole, manipulate, and threaten other countries into trade deals that keep the cash flowing homeward. And we enforce those trade deals with the very same silver bars, now inscribed with Babel’s work, that make our ships faster, our soldiers hardier, and our guns more deadly. It’s a vicious circle of profit, and unless some outside force breaks the cycle, sooner or later Britain will possess all the wealth in the world.

‘We are that outside force. Hermes. We funnel silver away to people, communities, and movements that deserve it. We aid slave revolts. Resistance movements. We melt down silver bars made for cleaning doilies and use them to cure disease instead.’ Griffin slowed down; turned to look Robin in the eyes. ‘That’s what this is all for.’

This was, Robin had to admit, a very compelling theory of the world. Only it seemed to implicate nearly everything he held dear. ‘I – I see.’

‘So why the hesitation?’

Why indeed? Robin tried to sort through his confusion, to find a reason for prudence that did not simply boil down to fear. But that was precisely it – fear of consequences, fear of breaking the gorgeous illusion of the Oxford he’d won admission to, the one Griffin had just sullied before he’d been able to properly enjoy it.

‘It’s just so sudden,’ he said. ‘And I’ve only just met you, there’s so much I don’t know.’