Page 68 of Babel

He felt a slight thrum beneath his fingertips. The garden did seem quieter then, more serene, though he couldn’t tell if this was his doing or his imagination. ‘Have we done it?’

‘Well, we’d better hope so.’ Professor Chakravarti slung his tool bag over his shoulder. He was not concerned enough to check. ‘Come on, let’s go and get paid.’

‘Do you always need to speak the match-pair to make it work?’ Robin asked as they walked back to campus. ‘It seems untenable – that is, there are so many bars, and so few translators.’

‘Well, that depends on a number of things,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘To begin with, the nature of the impact. With some bars, you want a temporary manifestation. Suppose you need a short and extreme physical effect – a lot of military bars work this way. Then they need to be activated each time upon use, and they’re designed so that the effects don’t last long. But other bars have an enduring effect – like the wards in the tower, for example, or the bars installed in ships and carriages.’

‘What makes them last longer?’

‘The number of carats, to start with. Finer silver endures, and the higher the percentage of other alloys, the shorter the time of effect. But there are also subtle differences in the way they’re smelted and engraved; you’ll learn soon enough.’ Professor Chakravarti shot him a smile. ‘You’re eager to get started, aren’t you?’

‘It’s just very exciting, sir.’

‘That’ll wear off,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘Walk around town muttering the same words over and over again, and soon you start feeling like a parrot instead of a magician.’

One afternoon, they arrived at the Ashmolean Museum to fix a silver bar that no number of incantations would activate. The English side read verify, and the Chinese side used the character ?, meaning ‘to validate’. It could also mean ‘to juxtapose’, ‘to arrange side by side’, and ‘to compare things’. The Ashmolean staff had been using this to compare fraudulent artifacts against the real ones, but recently it had failed several test runs, which the staff wisely conducted before appraising new acquisitions.

They carefully inspected the bar under a hand-held microscope, but neither the Chinese nor the English calligraphy showed any sign of erosion. Even after Professor Chakravarti went over the whole thing with his smallest engraving stylus, it still failed to activate.

He sighed. ‘Wrap that up and put it in my bag, won’t you?’

Robin obeyed. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Its resonance link has stopped working. It happens sometimes, especially with some of the older match-pairs.’

‘What’s a resonance link?’

‘Off to the tower,’ said Professor Chakravarti, already walking away. ‘You’ll see what I mean.’

Back at Babel, Professor Chakravarti led Robin up to the southern wing of the eighth floor, past the worktables. Robin had never been in this area before. All of his visits to the eighth floor had been restricted to the workshop, which occupied most of what the eye saw past the thick fire door. But another set of doors blocked off the southern wing, bolted shut with three sets of locks, which Professor Chakravarti now opened with a jangling ring of keys.

‘I’m really not supposed to show you just yet.’ Professor Chakravarti winked at him. ‘Privileged information and all that. But there’s no other way to explain.’

He undid the final lock. They stepped through.

It was like entering a fun house exhibit, or the inside of a giant piano. Massive silver rods of varying heights and lengths stood upright all across the floor. Some were waist high; others towered above him, stretching from the floor to the ceiling, with just enough room between them for one to step nimbly through without touching any. They reminded Robin rather of church organs; he had a strange impulse to take a mallet and strike them all at once.

‘Resonance is a way of cutting costs,’ Professor Chakravarti explained. ‘We need to save the higher-carat silver for bars with endurance needs – the bars that go into the Navy, that protect merchant ships, and the like. So we use silver with a higher percentage of alloys for the bars that operate on English land, since we can keep them fuelled with resonance.’

Robin peered around, amazed. ‘But how does it all work?’

‘It’s easiest to think of Babel as the centre, and all the resonance-dependent bars in England as the periphery. The periphery draws on the centre for power.’ Professor Chakravarti gestured around him. Each rod, Robin noticed, appeared to be vibrating at a very high frequency, but though it felt as if the tower should be ringing with discordant notes, the air was still and silent. ‘These rods, engraved with commonly used match-pairs, sustain linked bars throughout the country. The manifesting power comes from the rod, you see, which means that the bars outside don’t require such constant reactivation.’

‘Like British outposts in the colonies,’ said Robin. ‘Calling upon home for soldiers and supplies.’

‘A convenient metaphor, yes.’

‘So do these resonate with every bar in England?’ Robin saw in his mind an invisible network of meaning stretching over the country, keeping the silver-work alive. It was quite terrifying to consider. ‘I’d have thought there would be more of them.’

‘Not quite. There are much smaller resonance centres across the country – there’s one in Edinburgh, for example, and one in Cambridge. The effect does weaken with distance. But the lion’s share is in Oxford – it spreads the Translation Institute too far out to maintain multiple centres, as you need trained translators for the upkeep.’

Robin bent to examine one of the closest rods. In addition to the match-pair, written in large calligraphy at the top, he saw a series of letters and symbols that he could make no sense of. ‘How’s the link forged, then?’

‘It’s a complicated process.’ Professor Chakravarti led Robin to a slender rod near the south-side window. He knelt down, retrieved the Ashmolean bar from his bag, and held it up against the rod. Robin noticed then a number of etchings in the side of the rod that corresponded with similar etchings in the bar. ‘They’ve got to be smelted from the same material. And then there’s a good deal of etymological symbol work – you’ll learn all of that in your fourth year, if you specialize in silver-working. We actually use an invented alphabet, based on a manuscript first discovered by an alchemist from Prague in the seventeenth century.* It’s so that no one outside Babel can replicate our process. For now, you can think of all this adjustment as deepening the bond of connection.’

‘But I thought fake languages didn’t work to activate the bars,’ said Robin.

‘They don’t to manifest meaning,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘As a linking mechanism, however, they work quite well. We could do with basic numbers, but Playfair likes his mysteries. Keeps things proprietary.’