Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel #1)

by Josiah Bancroft

These trivial facts comforted him, as all facts did. Thomas Senlin was a reserved and naturally timid man who took confidence in schedules and regimens and written accounts.

Climbing the Tower of Babel, even if only a little way, was his greatest ambition, and he was quite excited. Not that anyone would know it to look at him: He affected a cool detachment as a rule, concealing the inner flights of his emotions. It was how he conducted himself in the classroom. He didn’t know how else to behave anymore.

In that moment of nausea and disorientation, he recalled Marya’s description of how it felt to play the piano at the Blue Tattoo. She said, “I play and we sing until the room spins. It feels lovely to be at the center of that merry little circle.” “But, my dear,” he replied, mistaking this as an appropriate time for a lecture on geometry, “the center of a circle is an infinitesimally small point. It hardly exists at all.” “Suits me. I’d rather be a nothing at the center of everything than a puffed-up somebody at the edge of it all.”

Inevitably, invariably, eventually you will discover you are unprepared to make an informed choice. When in doubt, say, Yes. Yes is the eternal passport. Yes is the everlasting coin. —Everyman’s Guide to the Tower of Babel, I. XII

Senlin persisted, driven by the ideal that knowledge was the great antiseptic; the more educated a society was, the more clean, safe, equal, and prosperous it would be.

“Instinct can be roughly divided into two urges: the urge to survive and the urge to reproduce. In humans, the conscious mind is aware of these urges. We built a society to manage our instincts. In fact, society so thoroughly mitigates our instincts, it is easy to forget that we have them at all.” He turned to the blackboard and began jotting a frenzied list. “We have customs, manners, governance, the constabulary, traditions, education, fashion, commerce, creative invention, sports, and on and on. All of these expressions of our society work to the same goal of suppressing and managing our instinctual response.” The blackboard rattled and rocked on its feet, shaken by Senlin’s emphatic jots. “Instinct is the fuel that fires the engine of civilization. Generations have labored to build and perfect the engine. Each of you, I hope, will spend your life working to preserve it. Because without it, we would be dangerous beasts.”