Babel

by R.F. Kuang

The note was in Chinese. Robin read it twice, then backwards, then forwards again, perplexed. Griffin seemed to have strung together characters utterly at random and the sentences did not make sense – no, they could not even be described as sentences, for although there was punctuation, the characters were arranged without care for grammar or syntax. This was a cipher, surely, but Griffin had not given Robin a key, and Robin could think of no literary allusions or subtle hints Griffin might have dropped to help him decode this nonsense. At last he realized he was going about it all wrong. This was not Chinese. Griffin had merely used Chinese characters to convey words in a language Robin suspected was English. He ripped a sheet of paper from his diary, placed it next to Griffin’s note, and wrote out the romanization of each character. Some of the words took guesswork, since romanized Chinese words had very different spelling patterns to English words, but in the end, through working out several common change patterns – tè always meant ‘the’, ü was oo – Robin broke the code. The next rainy night. Open the door at precisely midnight, wait inside the foyer, then walk back out at five past. Speak to no one. Go straight home after. Do not deviate from my instructions. Memorize, then burn. Curt, direct, and minimally informative – just like Griffin. It rained constantly at Oxford. The next rainy night could be tomorrow. Robin read the note again and again until he’d committed th...