The Storm of Echoes

by Christelle Dabos

  Thorn closed all the curtains, releasing a cloud of dust. He wedged a chair against the door to prevent any intrusion, and then turned to Lazarus with a grinding of his leg. His expression was fierce, but he didn’t utter a word. Ophelia did so for both of them:

  “Liar.”

  Lazarus put the cookie jar he had found down with annoyance, on noticing that its contents were moldy.

  “By omission only. I have never distorted the truth, but neither have I revealed it entirely, either. That is a notable difference. I sense that you are displeased,” he said, with a half-smile. “Is that because you haven’t yet found the Other? Don’t be hard on yourself, ma chère, you have done something far better. Walter!” he shouted, clapping his hands, “Disc No. 118!”

  The automaton, who was tilting an empty teapot over an equally empty cup, started to produce a mechanical rumbling noise, as if his innards were changing place. After a few seconds, two croaky voices burst out of his middle:

  “WHAT ARE YOU . . . YOU GOING TO DO WITH . . . WITH THE HORN OF PLENTY?” asked the first.

  “YOU HAVE ACHIEVED . . . ACHIEVED A MIRACLE, MADEMOISELLE,” replied the second. “NO CANDIDATE . . . CANDIDATE BEFORE YOU HAD ACHIEVED . . . ACHIEVED CRYSTALLIZATION. WE WILL MAKE SURE THAT . . . THAT YOUR MIRACLE GOES ON TO ACHIEVE . . . ACHIEVE NEW MIRACLES.”

  “Thank you, Walter, that will do.”

  Ophelia’s glasses had turned yellow on her nose.

  “That was my last conversation with the observer. How did you . . . Is it that beetle?”

  Lazarus smiled, euphorically.

  “My automatons are all linked, one to the other. Trade secret,” he explained, with a wink. “I can thus keep an ear to the observatory, and beyond, while continuing with my exploring.”

  It seemed to Ophelia that she was encountering the real Lazarus for the first time. This old man, with his exaggerated gestures, sparkling, down to the enamel of his teeth, had ceased to be a pawn on the chessboard. He had become a major chess piece. From the start, he knew. He knew that this God he served was Eulalia, that the Other was her echo, and doubtless many other things about which neither Ophelia nor Thorn had the slightest idea. Things he had deliberately kept from them.

  Walter pulled chairs out from the meeting table so everyone could make themselves comfortable—he pulled out far too many, in fact—but Lazarus was the only one to sit down.

  “The last time we saw each other, I told you that the echoes were the key to it all. I’m flattered to see that you followed my lead to the very end. I was sincere when I told you that I wanted to offer my services to Lady Gonde—I presume that all of us here know the secret of her true identity, so let’s call her by her proper name. I want to make her parfait world even more parfait! A world in which man won’t ever again be forced into servitude by man, or be alienated by material needs. Where do wars come from? What is the origin of conflict? Dissatisfaction. Behind the ideologies, there’s always a material motive.”

  Lazarus kept crossing and uncrossing his legs, and twiddling his thumbs, as his excitement grew. He was addressing only Ophelia, as if Thorn was to her what Walter was to him.

  “So, the Horn of Plenty,” she murmured, “has always been you.”

  “Not always, and not only me,” Lazarus corrected her, sounding modest. “All the observers you encountered belong to the powerless. We unified. There was even a time, which, malheureusement, I didn’t know, when Mademoiselle Hildegarde worked in concert with the observatory, but she later dissociated herself from it over a difference of opinions.”

  Ophelia thought back to the beetle woman, the lizard man, and the young girl with the monkey. So, they were all powerless. That was why the Deviations Observatory had given itself non-existent directors. Babel was one of the most egalitarian arks—it had been before the landslides, at any rate—but rare were the powerless who reached responsible positions over there.

  “The Knight, that was you, too,” said Ophelia. “You were in the Pole at the time of his arrest. You got him out of Helheim in order to recruit him.”

  “A most interesting boy! His family power suffered from a highly unusual form of deviation before his Mutilation. I had visited him at Helheim out of curiosity. I am, as you have discovered, extrêmement curious about everything.” Lazarus’s eyes began to shine behind his pink lenses. “We talked for a long time, he and I. The formerly powerless once again powerless. Don’t take offense, but I wanted to find out about you. We had just learnt that you were linked to the Other, and that young boy had himself found out a good deal about you. It struck me that he would fit in far better at our observatory.”

  That’s one, thought Ophelia.

  “And Blaise,” she added, out loud. “He once told me that you had been his teacher and confidant. That you found him interesting, too. Was it you who arranged for him to be enrolled in the Alternative Program?”

  Lazarus nodded, with barely less enthusiasm.

  “I have always thought, and still do, that there’s a connection between his bad luck and the echoes, but his stay at the observatory wasn’t enlightening. I’m not at all surprised that you became close to him! As I’ve told you before, and tell you again: we inverts, we’re all woven into the same destiny.”

  That’s two.

  “And Elizabeth,” she continued. “The offer of a post at the observatory that the Genealogists wanted her to accept for them, it came from you.”

  Once again, Lazarus nodded. His zeal almost made his chair tip backwards.

  “I witnessed her receiving the prize for excellence, and I thought how precious her talents would be to us. I may serve Lady Gonde, but she didn’t reveal the secret of her code to me. Had Mademoiselle Elizabeth not been so submissive to the Genealogists, she could have been rallied to our cause . . . as you yourself were.”

  He seemed happy, genuinely happy, finally to be able to speak to her frankly, and to answer her questions. Impatient, too, to broach the subject she was intentionally delaying broaching. As for Thorn, his eyes were glued to his watch, as if he were counting every move of its hands. Ophelia was surprised at his silence, since he had got her used to him doing any questioning, but, just like him, she was silently counting.

  That’s three.

  “And Ambrose?”

  “Quoi, Ambrose?” Lazarus asked, with surprise.

  “We found his funerary urn.”

  Lazarus uncrossed his legs to place his two white shoes squarely on the floor. His face showed no disappointment, just intense melancholy.

  “I see. In that case, it’s no longer necessary to keep from you what he really is. First, I must ask you a favor: don’t speak to him about what I’m going to tell you. He’s so very sensitive!”

  Neither Ophelia nor Thorn promised anything. They stood waiting, silent and tense.

  Lazarus had a quick look at the door, blocked by the chair.

  “Ambrose is an echo incarnate. More precisely, he is the echo of an old friend of mine. A friend with whom I co-founded the Alternative Program. A friend who was committed, body and soul, to Project Cornucopianism. It is his funerary urn that you found.”

  “An echo incarnate,” Ophelia repeated, her voice thickening. “Like the faulty objects of your Horn of Plenty?”

  Lazarus put a hand on his stomach as he laughed, as though stabbed in the back.

  “Faulty, now hold on a minute! Perfectible, let’s say. Ambrose opened the way to some dizzying possibilities, all the implications of which maybe you don’t yet understand.”

  Ophelia bit her tongue until it hurt. This conversation was really churning her up inside.

  “Does he have a code, too?”

  “He does have one, yes. On his back, so that he can neither see it nor touch it. This code pales into insignificance compared with the one invented by Eulalia Gonde, but it allows him to settle into his material f
orm. For pity’s sake, never mention it in front of him!” stressed Lazarus. “This code also prevents him from being aware of his nature, or his life expectancy. I find it upsetting enough already when he asks me questions about the mother he never knew—and for good reason.”

  That’s four.

  “And the original Ambrose, your friend, what became of him? Is he dead?”

  A smile shone out against Lazarus’s skin, now brown from the sun and the mud.

  “Oh, no, ma chère, I’m convinced that he’s still very much alive.”

  It was a rather strange response, but Lazarus caught Ophelia unawares by indicating the right side of his own chest, where his inverted heart was beating. His expression was so passionate, she almost feared an amorous declaration.

  “I have spoken to you of my situs transversus. My body’s symmetry is reversed, which meant that I, too, a very long time ago, before being approached by Lady Gonde, even before joining the Good Family, was a subject of the observatory. I was but a child. At the time, that establishment’s only aim was to correct deviations, and I thought that such a shame! I didn’t want to be ‘rectified,’ quite the contrary. I told you how my inversion made me receptive to other inverts, such as you, that it gave me intuitions. It also makes me receptive to echoes, and the observatory is full of them! I’m absolument certain that you sensed them, too, those echoes from the past. You’re not a reader of objects for nothing.”

  Ophelia had to admit, she had experienced her most immersive visions over there. Her hands may have been out of order at the time, but her entire body had become like a sounding board.

  “It was the echoes at the observatory that told me its story,” explained Lazarus, his voice increasingly resonant. “the story of Eulalia Gonde, of the birth of the Other, and of that project I decided to start from scratch with my old friend Ambrose, when we were heading the observatory. There was so much to do to rid our world of its final impurities . . . Ah, forty years ago, already!” sighed the seated Lazarus, as his spectacles misted up with emotion. “It makes me sound old.”

  Ophelia felt a loathing so strong, she bristled all over. Forty years. It was around that time that weapon collections and war archives had been purged from Babel, as from Anima. Lazarus may not have spoken to Eulalia Gonde of his intention to recreate a Horn of Plenty, but he had no less influenced her approach by toughening censorship across all the arks. He had used the past to stop humanity knowing its own past.

  Oh, yes, this old man with the pink spectacles and ridiculous ways was deplorable. Ophelia’s museum had been mutilated, just as she had been herself, losing part of her family power, due to him.

  That’s five.

  “The echoes of yesterday are not the only ones to have something to teach,” Lazarus continued, warmly, impervious to her dislike of him. “The advance echoes have just as much, if not more.”

  Ophelia was really annoyed to realize how skilled Lazarus was at heightening her own curiosity. The more he spoke, the more she wanted to make him shut up and listen to him at the same time. As for Thorn, he was completely engrossed in his watch; he said nothing, didn’t move.

  Lazarus wagged his finger in a professorial manner.

  “If you have conducted your investigation correctly, as I believe you have, you already know something of what I am talking about. We are surrounded by a gas that I, personally, have named ‘aerargyrum.’ That air has nothing in common with the oxygen that keeps you alive. En fait, it resembles no known chemical element. It is extremely difficult to study, and rare are the scientists who are aware of its existence. So subtle is it, our finest observation instruments can only detect it in its condensed form, for example when we produce waves of it and they return to us as echoes. So subtle,” Lazarus insisted, stressing each word, “that the very fabric of time is different around it. You sense the echoes of the past. Me, powerless as I am, I sense the echoes of the future. An advance echo whispered to me in a dream that we would meet again in an unknown land. In other words, I was expecting you.”

  Lazarus’s crow’s-feet deepened around his eyes. With delight, he accepted the cup served to him by Walter, without noticing that it had been filled with dead flies.

  “If I stayed here all this time, it wasn’t merely to study the locals. It was also, and specifically, because I knew that our paths were going to converge here. Because I knew that I was destined to accompany you back to Babel, and reveal to you, personally, the secret of the third protocol.”

  Ophelia wondered how Thorn managed to remain so calm. She bluntly refused the cup of flies that Walter held out to her.

  “Your observatory delivered me to Lady Septima, who put me in an airship that came down beside this ark . . . so that you yourself can take me back to where I started? It makes no sense.”

  Lazarus nodded his chin in agreement with every word, but his eyes clouded over for a split second, before regaining their former brilliance, and that was enough for Ophelia to derive some satisfaction. Despite appearances, he had his doubts, too.

  “The logic of the echoes is not our logic,” he stated, with exaggerated conviction, “but be sure that there is a reason. A reason that we can’t yet discern. Zut!”

  Lazarus spat out the flies that he had inadvertently sipped. Walter’s faceless figure stood back impassively, like an inscrutable butler. Ophelia found them as absurd as each other. In fact, everything seemed absurd to her, suddenly: what she and Thorn had faced at the observatory, the investigation that they had conducted at the risk of compromising themselves as the world collapsed all around them, the death they had come so close to in that long-distance airship . . .

  That’s six and seven.

  “Why tell us this only here, and only now?”

  Ophelia’s voice had changed. Lazarus must have noticed because his own voice changed, too, when he replied to her:

  “The entire process depended on the choices you would make. It was my duty, in the interest of all of us, yours included, to keep quiet about anything that could influence your crystallization.”

  He leant on his knees to get up from his chair, as if his bones were suddenly showing the weight of the years.

  “And you succeeded. You have created a new Other. No one, not even my old friend Ambrose, managed to do that. All those echoes converted into matter, that poor boy I call ‘son,’ and the family spirits themselves, aren’t half as perfect as what you have given birth to.”

  He moved toward her, leaving the imprint of his soles on the floorboards. His white frock coat, still damp from his fall into the fountain, was weighing him down. And yet, there was a fieriness about him that made it seem as if there was lava beneath his wrinkled skin.

  “If you knew how much I’m burning to meet your echo! You may think that I’m in possession of all the truths, but I’m missing the most significant of them all: the one that holds the secret of the echoes and of our world, the one my old friend Ambrose took with him, the one that will allow me to give humanity what it’s missing in order finally to feel complete. For me, finally, to feel complete myself. See what Lady Gonde became, alone, thanks to her echo! Imagine what you in turn could become, what we could all become, together this time, thanks to yours! That would certainly give some sense to what has been sacrificed, don’t you think?”

  Some sense to what has been sacrificed. Ophelia turned these words over and over, until she herself was turned over by them.

  Eulalia Gonde had lost first her entire family, then half her life expectancy, and from those ashes the Other had been born. She had obtained from him, in return, a knowledge that had freed her from the limitations imposed by an aging body. If there was one thing Ophelia definitely didn’t want, it was to turn into Milliface, or to allow others to do so. No, none of that would make any sense of the death of Octavio. What had plunged into the void was irreplaceable.

  She found the way Lazarus eyed he
r hungrily as he advanced, step by step, hands outstretched, unpleasant. There was something possessive about his behavior, as if she and her echo belonged to him.

  “No, really, ma chère, don’t reproach yourself, above all, for not having found the Other yet,” he whispered, wrapping his palms, as warm and soft as his voice, around her bare shoulders. “In truth, all that you have been through was destined to draw you nearer to him. He is there, really close to you, from now on! I can almost feel his presence,” he concluded, with an excited pant. “And I’m convinced that you feel it, too.”

  What Ophelia felt was Lazarus’s breath. He coudn’t have used any toothpaste for weeks.

  “Have you finished?”

  A silence fell on the room, heavy as the air that had been stagnating there since the village had been abandoned. It was Thorn who had just asked this question, as the cover of his watch closed itself.

  Lazarus, still clinging to Ophelia’s shoulders, seemed only then to remember his existence.

  “Oh, I’ve never really finished,” he guffawed. “I’m an incorrigible chatterbox!”

  A ray of sunlight turned a curtain crimson, cut through the floating dust, and shone a bloodred light on Thorn’s face.

  “You are exactly like her,” he said, in a voice that came from deep inside him. “You are like Eulalia Gonde. You are toxic.”

  Ophelia was chilled by the look he was giving Lazarus. It was the look of his father’s clan; of a hunter confronting a Beast. For months, years, Thorn had fought relentlessly against his own claws. For the first time, Ophelia could see that he felt like giving in to them, even though he despised them, and, whenever he had used them, despised himself that bit more.

  She had promised herself to change that look.

  Lazarus studied Thorn through the spectacles that made him see a rose-tinted world. Did they, too, allow him to detect the shadows?

  “Come, come, dear boy, I know that, despite appearances, you loathe violence as much as I do. You’ve already got your hands dirty for your little wife. I’m sure she would hate for you to do so again.”