The Fall of Babel (The Books of Babel #4)

by Josiah Bancroft

We painted cavern walls to own the shadows with our palms. We carved the ground with county lines to legislate our qualms. We drew on heaven human shapes to stake the cosmic plot. Man would write upon his soul if pen could reach the spot. —Music for Falling Down Stairs by Jumet

Adam had known stevedores who played with loaded guns, men who stuck their hands into boxes of scorpions just to snatch at pennies, men who dropped knives between their naked toes, a game that grew progressively easier as the playing field gradually cleared. These violent gambles were meant to lance the boil of a cancer that grew too deep to eradicate—depression, anxiety, numbness. Adam wondered if Elrin was one of those whose torment was soothed by needless risk. The thought stirred a tinge of pity in him.

Men who brag about how they would’ve risen to the occasion amid some unattended crisis are pigeon-livered liars. There is nothing more flattering to one’s ego, nor more insulting to a survivor, than armchair courage and the valor of the parlor.

“Dad always said that we were the pests—always trampling the grass and picking the flowers. He would’ve sooner swatted a man than a fly.” She paused to scrub at an errant line with a rag that was as colorful as an opal. “Insects are pollinators and decomposers. Without them, the plants wouldn’t bear fruit, last year’s crops wouldn’t rot properly, and the soil would suffer. We’d starve to death in a world without insects. Of course, we try to keep certain things—like lice—out, but my father knew just how dependent we are upon all those so-called pests.”

Adam didn’t know what to say to console her. How did one go about mourning the loss of an abusive mother? The passing of Runa’s brother seemed to tighten a knot that had tangled over a lifetime. Adam had no doubt that Elrin’s fatal choice—which seemed the piteous act of a bullied boy—would be a slow-to-heal wound that Runa would have to tend for many years. But Ida’s death appeared to leave Runa with something much worse than a wound. It left her with one side of an argument that could never be answered and a grievance that could not be heard.

A soldier’s existence was like that of a bead on an abacus: a thing slapped back and forth on the same path for hours and years until it finally broke.

They were like the unwell man who delays a visit to the doctor, not because he believes his dawdling will cure him, but because denial is a desperate imitation of hope.

Byron knew that a home was an ephemeral thing. Home was a feeling engorged with memory, a sense of history enlarged by fondness and family and familiar things. Home was a ritual that harmonized with the melody of a day. It was a healer of all the humiliations and failures that must be borne in public but can only be mended in private. A home was the nest of the soul, a refuge more sacred than any chapel or mausoleum. But what made a home was far less sentimental. It was drudgery, pure and simple, that made a home.

Sometimes the fear of change is just an expression of love for the life you had.

The human race will go marching into that conclusive dark, singing our ballads and telling our stories and embellishing our walls with loafing nudes because that is who we really are: creatures who’ve only begun to believe in the scarce beauty of ourselves, and just in time for the point to be moot.

Marat twirled his wrist as if to lasso a thought from the air. “Hoddish is a means of management, a way to cloister the culture. If you wish to control a populace, you must first isolate it. A king hopes his subjects won’t listen to his enemies; an emperor ensures that they won’t. If you take away communication, you can install yourself as the only font of truth. Disobedience begins with discourse.”

Anyone who has ever peered into a telescope and spied the unexplored sprawl bottled therein knows that wonder only ceases when examination ends.

Marya broke in. “Forgive me, Captain, but I don’t think there’s any shame in doing your best. Of course, in hindsight, it’s easy to see a better course, a wiser choice. When I look back, I see a thousand small missteps that altogether brought me here. I try not to dwell on my mistakes because it doesn’t change them; it only changes me. I cannot live inside those awful moments, those naive blunders and prideful errors. It would drive me mad if I did.”

I’m still learning the flag alphabet, but I think it spells ‘unsafe passage.’ That, or ‘unsafe massage,’ which doesn’t sound so bad, really. I have a few knots in my back that could use an unsafe massage. I could give them a meat tenderizer and just let them go to work.”

Somehow, the addition of an infant to the crew seemed to shrink the available manpower by two. How plus one could equal minus two had been something of a mystery to Byron. Surely only a single soul was required to take care of an infant at any given moment. And yet, everyone seemed to be constantly running back and forth on some essential errand in service of the pink-faced, colicky despot. Or if they were not so engaged, then they were lying sprawled on a divan, driven to unconsciousness by bone-deep exhaustion. Byron had read that a fawn born in the morning could walk by the evening. Shark pups were birthed swimming, snapping, and eager to feed. But the human race came into the world with all the physical prowess of a custard and all the independence of a pimple.

At last, Edith had interrupted the magistrate’s dithering by saying, “Madam, you seem to be operating under the misapprehension that this is a negotiation. It is not. Either you take these men and women and do your utmost to heal them, or the Sphinx will remove all his protection from your ringdom, including protection from me.”

In search of entertainment, I became a pteridologist. That’s what a fern enthusiast is called. The glades were full of ferns, all sorts of varieties. Fascinating plants. They live through two generations, haploid and diploid—two radically different states, one green and rooted, the other minuscule and airborne. They reproduce asexually.” “Asexually?” Voleta echoed, crimping her brow. “Yes, it means they don’t need a partner to reproduce or thrive. They’re independent, self-contained.” “I like the sound of that.” “Perhaps you have a bit of fern in you.

know what they all got wrong? The nature of survival. The heroes who survived their ordeals always came out the other end unchanged. Maybe they walked away with a nice little scar on their cheek or a fitting shock of gray hair. But essentially, in all the ways that matter, they emerged the same as they were before.” He clucked his tongue and rolled his head upon his pillow. “That’s not how it is though, is it? Survival makes you a stranger to yourself.” “Then we can be strangers together.” Tom raised a hand to his headboard and rapped out their signal phrase—hard, soft, hard—a simple tattoo that had come to mean good night and I am glad you are close by and please, don’t leave and a hundred other things they’d not yet found the words or courage to say.

First, the masses must be coddled and made beholden, then given no alternative, and at last, when their fear is as potent as awe, they will have forgotten any illusion that they were ever my equal. Have no doubt, Tom, I will stand at my coronation, and all the Tower shall kneel.” As Senlin listened to Marat again expose the lavishness of his vanity, it dawned upon him how simple the world was in the eyes of a zealot. Everyone was either an implement or an idiot, a rung or an impediment, and the Tower was but a toy he had promised himself. His was not a complex philosophy, but rather an august sort of childishness. Civility, wisdom, and empathy required growth, sacrifice, a willingness to change, but evil never grew up. Evil was as callow and foolish at the end of itself as it was at the start.

“Stories are not without consequence.” “Perhaps. The human race will march into the darkness singing songs and telling stories because that is who we are and what we

The holdings of a ringdom’s Lost and Found are auctioned off according to their perishable nature: lost milk, bread, and cut flowers are sold after a day; lost fruit and leafy vegetables are sold after three days; lost onions, tubers, and children after a week; hard cheese and smoked meat go on the block after a fortnight.

Tellingly, none of the adventure stories Byron had ever read mentioned just how messy the adventuring business was. The hero never swept up the broken glass or mended the curtains after a brawl. No, duty called! The Sphinx’s footman suspected the hero’s true quest was to be on the road before the brooms came out. Byron liked to imagine that if every knight, soldier of fortune, and buccaneer were forced to scrub blood from a single area rug, that the tedious, unpleasant experience would usher in an era of peace. Let the generals mop up the battlefield for a change, then see how long they’d go before waging another war!

She felt the ambivalence she once had upon attending her own surprise party, an occasion that had been spoiled in advance by an indiscreet cousin with a carrying voice. In the days before her friends and family tried to stun her with birthday wishes, Marya had felt giddy over their sincere expression of affection, nervous about her ability to act suitably astonished, and irritated that what should’ve been a pleasant surprise had become an anxious act. When her loved ones finally popped out from behind her mother’s couch, Marya shouted in relief rather than surprise. There was nothing quite so exhausting as opposing emotions in equal supply.

“She sounds nice. I met someone, too.” Adam gaped up at her with an expression of apparent delight. “You did? That’s wonderful. Who’s the lucky man?” “Ann.” “Oh, who’s the lucky Ann, then?”

“Byron, I have spent so many months building up a cordial and indifferent front. I built a seawall out of a smile. I meant it to protect me, and it did. Too well, I think. Because the more distant you grow from everyone else, the stranger you become to yourself. It’s easier to be formal, yes; there’s a sanctuary in the pleases and thank-yous, a refuge in the customary. But you can’t live inside a smile.”

She finished pinning Olivet up and gathered her supplies. “Could you point us to the nearest park? I’d like to introduce Olivet to a tree. She’s never met one before.” “Do trees talk where you’re from?” Catherine asked with some amusement. “Oh, I think all trees can talk, it’s just that hardly anyone ever listens.”

“Unlovable? You? Iren, dear, as far as I’ve ever seen, in this world there are two great nations of the Unadored. There are the Love Gluttons who feel they cannot dote on anyone for fear of stealing some small measure of kindness from themselves, and there are those Paupers of Affection who refuse to care in retribution for the love they feel they deserve and have been denied. Both think the feast of human kindness small, the table settings but few. That has never been you, my dear. Never. Your heart is bigger than your chest. It drums so loud I can hear it from across the room. I hear it through doors and down halls, hear it beat in my sleep and throughout my dreams…”

Pilgrims are encouraged to remember that the principal consumer of sheep is not wolves but shepherds.

There’s really only one thing I wanted to say, something you might find useful someday. It’s something my mother told me when I was about your age. It’s this: When you think little of yourself, everyone else’s opinion of you becomes more important than your own. I hope you don’t slouch your way through your life, trying to hide the greatness in you for fear of putting someone else off.

suppose you could look at it that way, Mr. Senlin. You could resent yourself for your imperfect enjoyment of your life, but that seems to me like a never-ending chore. A thankless one, too. I think that if we really knew how good our lives were while they were good, we’d be too scared to do anything, change anything. We’d never take a risk, or explore, or grow. You can hate yourself for not fully appreciating your happy days while you had them, or you could look back and be warmed by the memory, couldn’t you?”

The smell of ripening peaches struck him like an epiphany. How long had it been since he’d eaten a peach?

“I found that once I became aware of my clothes, I could hardly think of anything else. Every time I found myself enthralled by some lofty thought or tantalizing epiphany, my attention would be wrenched back by a rough collar or a tight button or a bunched-up sock.

Do not race your postcards home. Dally long enough for word of your adventures to arrive before you. Let them announce you and lay the foundation for your legend.

“The reason we study and learn, the reason we take only what we need, is because we have all been given a great gift—the gift of civilization, the gift of understanding, the gift of mastery over our environment—and if we misuse these, if we take these things for granted, the ones who will suffer most are our sons and daughters. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the fruits of our ancestors’ labor. We should relish the pudding. But that privilege does not relieve us of our responsibility to be faithful custodians of the world we leave for our children.”