“Are you still determined to enter the observatory?”
“Yes.”
“I wanted to discourage you. Forget that. Everyone should have the right to go wherever they want.”
“Octavio—”
“What my mother said today in that amphitheater . . .” he interrupted her, his voice tight. “I am so ashamed.”
Ophelia watched the gray water trickling through his fingers. She herself had a real taste of ashes in her mouth.
“Would you like to—”
“. . . be alone. Yes. S’il te plaît.”
Octavio curled his hands into fists against his eyes, and then added, falteringly:
“Tomorrow, I will return to the journal. I will return to the Good Family. I will change things from the inside. I promise you. But this evening, don’t look at me.”
Ophelia backed away.
“What you said today in that amphitheater . . .” she said, quietly, before closing the door. “I’m so proud.”
Without the slightest idea what she was doing, and without the slightest hesitation, either, Ophelia clambered up the factory’s small staircase. She emerged onto a roof that had been turned into a terrace, wedged between two brick chimney stacks. The factory cleaved the sea of clouds like an ocean liner.
Ophelia gripped the wrought-iron guardrail to control her shaking. The whistleblowing of arrests being made still rose up from the town center.
It isn’t my fault, she repeated to herself, several times.
It wasn’t her fault if there were landslides. It wasn’t her fault if there were expulsions.
She raised her glasses from the fog to direct them into the distance, above the sea of clouds, toward the artificial lights merging into the stars. Babel’s minor arks. With ease, Ophelia located the dome of the Memorial, bright as a beacon, and the more discreet lamps of the Good Family. The sight of them filled her with nostalgia. These places had been hers for a while. Having been treated as an undesirable had wounded her.
How many people today had been dispatched far away against their will? How many would arrive safe and sound, despite the echoes?
“They are everywhere, and around you even more than anywhere else,” Helen had said.
“Look closely into the echoes. They’re the key to it all,” Lazarus had said.
Ophelia was trying to understand, she really was trying. An invisible thread seemed to connect Eulalia Gonde, the Other, the landslides, and the echoes, but it was full of knots.
An exterior light went out just as Blaise came to lean on his elbows, to her left, up on the roof. His profile, with its long, pointed nose, was barely discernible in the dark.
“Whatever you’ve got on your mind, Mademoiselle Eulalia, you’re going to have to be très careful. The family guard has memorized your smell, as it has that of all those who were over there. They are first-class Olfactories, they will track you down relentlessly.”
“I’m not staying in town. But what will become of the others?”
Professor Wolf leaned on his elbows to the right of Ophelia. The glow from his forehead replaced the light that had gone out. He had lost his dark glasses and hat. Judging by the way he was clutching his neck brace, that race across the city had severely tested his vertebrae.
“Lazarus’s kid is going to put us up until things settle down. He’s got guts. If we go down, he’ll go down with us.”
Blaise ruffled his hair, making it stick up even more.
“It would seem that life in Babel is about to get even more complicated for us.”
Elbow to elbow with these two men, whom the whole world prohibited from touching each other, Ophelia felt the urgent desire to protect them growing inside her. If a single landslide had divided an entire city, what would happen if it were ever to occur again? Wherever the Other was, whatever its appearance and its intentions, Ophelia knew at least this much: it would strike again if she didn’t stop it first.
She looked even further away, toward the most distant points of light. Over there, at this precise moment, somewhere behind certain walls, Babelians were working on the Cornucopianism project, just as Eulalia Gonde had before becoming God. Was Thorn right in thinking that what was done could be undone? Was it possible to bring Eulalia Gonde back to her human state, send the Other back into the mirror, and repair what was still repairable? And what if the only remedy for the void was plenty? But what would be the role of the echoes in all that?
Ophelia felt duty bound to find the answers at the Deviations Observatory. With Thorn.
“No one takes themselves voluntarily to that kind of institution without having a very good reason,” he had warned her.
What she found wonderfully ironic in this whole situation was that the Lords of LUX had just provided her with what she had lacked.
IN THE WINGS
He wanders the streets of Babel. Cries, whistles. Pollux’s family guard arresting anything that moves. Anything but him, obviously. He could dance under their very noses, and they wouldn’t arrest him.
No one ever arrests him.
A couple of steps, and he reaches the summit of the highest pyramid. There he sits down and watches Babel sinking into the fog. The aging Babel. A city far too old for their tiny little memories.
History is going to repeat itself. He’s seen to that.
It would have been premature for Ophelia to leave Babel today. She has something else to accomplish here, within the archipelago’s borders, at the Deviations Observatory.
Oh yes, history is going to repeat itself. Like that, it will finally be able to end itself.
THE TRAP
The automatons’ inanimate bodies were harnessed to the heliwagon’s roof. Every jolt shook their limbs, making a bone-rattling sound. Plunged in darkness, Ophelia felt as if she were surrounded by skeletons. She leaned against one of them when she sensed the heliwagon was losing altitude. Yet another aerial check? The rear doors half-opened. The beam of a torch lit up the faceless head of an automaton beside Ophelia, then the doors closed and the hum of the heliwagon’s propellers started up again.
“Sir Octavio and Sir Ambrose say we shouldn’t encounter any more patrols.”
Ophelia could just make out a shaggy-haired figure among the automatons, elbowing his way through with difficulty to join her at the back. As soon as she lifted the turban hiding her forehead, her stamp cast a lunar glow on Blaise, and shadows between the worry lines on his skin. Noticing them, Ophelia regretted having told him of her intention to enter the Deviations Observatory; ever since, he had been determined to escort her.
“You should have stayed at the factory with the other outlaws,” she said, sighing. “If I get caught . . .”
“They will deport me, too? Between you and me, Mademoiselle Eulalia, I won’t remain on an ark that doesn’t want people who are dear to me. And also, I wanted to discuss something with you, but . . . eh bien . . . not in front of Wolf.”
Sheepishly, Blaise rolled up the sleeve of his Memorialist uniform to uncover his arm. By the light of her forehead, Ophelia could make out a tattoo. An interlaced “A” and “P.”
“It stands for ‘Alternative Program,’” explained Blaise.
It took a certain time before Ophelia understood.
“You have been part of the Deviations Observatory?”
“I don’t know why it’s so important to you to get in there, mademoiselle. What I do know is how hard it was for me to get out of there. My parents had sent me there for me to be . . . you know . . . corrected.” Blaise smiled sadly as he said the word. “I was still only an adolescent, but they had already understood the path I was taking. I remained at the observatory until I came of age, and even after that, I wasn’t allowed to quit the program.”
Squashed by the automatons and shaken by the jolts, Ophelia gazed at the two letters tattooed on Blaise’s arm
. Marked for life.
“What is it, the Alternative Program?”
“The other side of the picture. The Deviations Observatory is renowned for achieving excellent results in . . . in cases such as mine, among others. But when they examined me, they assured my parents that my condition didn’t fall within the standard program, that I was an invert of a très particular sort, that they were prepared to take me on entirely at their expense in order to study me. I got board and lodgings and laundry for years. Every month, I asked to go home, and every month I was told that it wasn’t my decision. And then, from one day to the next, they returned me to my parents, with no explanation. As if I was no longer of the slightest interest to them. I have only confused memories of what went on over there, of what I did there, of what I witnessed there. But if I can be sure of one thing, mademoiselle, it’s that the observatory was far less interested in my romantic preferences than in my bad luck.”
Blaise had declared this while shoving Ophelia to one side. An automaton’s harness had come undone just behind her, threatening to bring several pounds of metal crashing down on her head.
“Your bad luck,” she repeated. “Why?”
“They didn’t tell me. They never say anything. They observe.”
“But you,” Ophelia insisted, “did you observe anything special over there?”
“Everything’s special over there, mademoiselle. I was surrounded by inverts. Inverted minds. Inverted bodies. Inverted powers.”
Ophelia hesitated. She wouldn’t get another chance to ask questions to someone who had known the observatory that intimately, even if it was long ago.
“Did you hear any mention of the ‘Cornucopianism project’?”
Blaise’s forehead wrinkled even more as his eyebrows shot up.
“Never.”
“Of the Horn of Plenty, maybe?”
He shook his head.
“It wasn’t mentioned in front of me at the observatory, but I repeat to you: they never say anything.”
Ophelia looked at the dislocated body at her feet. When not wound up, an automaton really was like a skeleton. She remembered the conversation they had once had, she and Blaise, in the city’s catacombs. “Some humans are objects while they’re alive.”
“What they did to you . . . What they’re going to do to me,” she said, in a voice she wished sounded braver. “Am I going to suffer?”
Blaise’s face stretched like rubber, and then he clumsily grabbed her shoulders.
“Not in the sense that . . . that you mean it. It’s just . . . just that . . . Zut!”
Blaise had never found expressing himself that easy, but the more he spoke of the observatory, the worse his stammer became, as if he himself were suddenly full of echoes. His fingers gripped Ophelia’s shoulders. His dark, moist eyes widened.
“Within each of us there exists a boundary, Mademoiselle Eulalia. Something that is . . . is necessary, something that limits us, something that . . . that contains us inside ourselves. They . . . they will try to make you cross that boundary. Whatever they say to you, mademoiselle, the decision will be yours.”
From the way her feet seemed to want to leave the floor, Ophelia sensed that the heliwagon was just landing. They were arriving. She was arriving. Thorn was expecting her. It mattered little what this observatory had in store for her, she wouldn’t be alone. Even here, in this heliwagon, she wasn’t alone.
“Thank you, Blaise. Take care of yourself. And of Professor Wolf.”
Blaise’s hands let go of Ophelia’s shoulders to clasp her face. He pressed his forehead against hers, blocking out the light on it.
“He avoided me for fifteen years,” he whispered to her, so quietly he seemed to want her to be the only one in the world to hear him. “Fifteen long years during which I thought he was protecting himself from me, when in fact it was me he was protecting from himself. Until the collapse of the northwestern district. Because you had advised him to speak to me. I don’t know if you’re aware,” said Blaise, searching for Ophelia’s eyes in the depths of her glasses, “of the loneliness you rescued me from that day you spoke to me for the first time in that birdtrain.”
Their foreheads knocked together when the heliwagon came to a halt. After a few moments, the rear doors opened. It was Octavio.
“No one in sight. Hurry up.”
Ophelia pulled her turban down over her forehead before slipping out. The dawn was a tepid pink. Palm trees shivered in the vicinity of the void. The heliwagon had landed on a delivery terrace at the top of a tower. Octavio was right, the place was deserted.
Ophelia went closer to the edge. She wanted to see the observatory from above before experiencing it from the inside. It was spread out before her, an inextricable tangle of pagodas and railroad tracks, gardens and factories, old stones and metal structures. It had something of both the ancient imperial city and the industrial park about it. And yet Ophelia soon clocked a system within this seeming chaos: the observatory was divided into sectors separated by gigantic red doors, themselves incorporated within fortifications. A calculated partitioning.
The institute was dominated, at its center, by a colossal statue: a giant whose head had several faces. “I see everything, I know everything!” it silently proclaimed.
“In that case, let’s talk a little,” Ophelia whispered to it. “That’s what I’ve come for.”
She returned to the heliwagon’s controls, where Ambrose held an inverted hand out to her, through the opening in the door.
“Bonne chance, mademoiselle. I envy you a little, I’m so curious to know what they study here! My father told me that, of all his clients, the Deviations Observatory was the one that ordered the most unusual items from him. I wouldn’t be surprised if you came across some pretty disconcerting automatons in there.”
Ophelia didn’t find this prospect particularly encouraging. She couldn’t stop herself from reaching toward the scarf, rolled into a ball on the adolescent’s head, but all she got was a stirring of sulky wool. This new separation she was imposing on both of them didn’t bode well for a reconciliation.
“Désolé,” said Ambrose, looking embarrassed.
Ophelia shook his hand as awkwardly as he did hers.
“There’s an Animist proverb: ‘Like master, like object.’ You give my scarf the feeling you gave me from our first encounter, and that you’re giving many people today. That of sanctuary.”
Octavio had observed their exchange through the gap in his fringe. His tired eyes hadn’t yet recovered their brilliance, but they were scrutinizing Ambrose with an indecipherable expression. He indicated a hangar, made up of thousands of panes of glass, at the other end of the delivery terrace.
“There must be a tradesmen’s entrance there. I’ll accompany her and then be back,” he told Ambrose and Blaise.
Inside the hangar, Ophelia and Octavio saw only pyramids of crates and stationary small trucks. True, it was still early, but after the hysteria that had swept the rest of Babel, this calm was unnerving.
They descended the tower’s numerous stories in a service elevator.
“Is that Ambrose really the son of Professor Lazarus?” Octavio asked, abruptly. “He doesn’t look like him. En fait,” he added, not allowing Ophelia the chance to reply, “he looks like no one. I sat beside him throughout the flight. His body really is very strange.”
Ophelia refrained from retorting that her own body was no less strange, and that she intended to use that fact to infiltrate this place. Even if that thought made her stomach shudder.
“Will you return to the Official Journal after this?”
“First to the Good Family. I’m responsible for the division of Pollux’s apprentice Forerunners. If I don’t clock in every day, it would be considered a dereliction of duty.”
Ophelia raised her eyebrows.
“After all that’s happe
ned? After the collapse of the northwestern district? After the riots in the city center?”
“Especially after all that. It’s order versus chaos, from now on.”
The service elevator eventually opened onto a corridor, which led to another corridor, which led to a reception. They found no one there, either. Some forms were provided on the counter. You had to fill one in yourself, slip it through the slot of a tube, and lower the lever to propel the pneumatic dispatch. Ophelia had already been through this procedure once before, to see Mediana. Today, instead of ticking the box “VISIT,” she ticked the box “ADMISSION.”
She didn’t even have time to make for the waiting room before a polite voice called out to her:
“Mademoiselle Eulalia?”
A woman was walking steadily toward her. It wasn’t the young girl Ophelia had dealt with on her first visit, but she was wearing the same yellow-silk sari, the same dark-lensed pince-nez, and the same long leather gloves. On her shoulder she had a mechanical beetle, and under her arm, a document-holder on which was clipped the form Ophelia had only just filled in. As if she’d been lying in wait for her for days.
“This way, s’il vous plaît,” she said, opening a pretty glass door to her. “Not you, my lord.”
The woman had directed a stiff smile at Octavio, who was already following on. She showed no regard for his virtuoso’s uniform and didn’t ask him for his name. She already knew perfectly well who he was.
Ophelia exchanged a final look with him. An intense look.
“Changing the world,” she murmured to him.
The corners of Octavio’s mouth quivered. He jerked up his head so his whole fringe was flung back, laying bare the scars on his nose and eyebrow where, previously, he wore his gold chain.
“From the inside,” he said in reply.
He left with a resolute clicking of his heels, instilling courage in Ophelia. She followed the woman across a room that might have resembled a medical office had there not been beetles on all the shelves. They shone like precious stones in the morning light from the windows.
The Storm of Echoes Page 11