The Storm of Echoes

by Christelle Dabos

  Ophelia could almost have forgotten about the pistols.

  She squinted at the two parabolic mirrors on either side of the cavern, facing each other, huge as Cyclops, turning like windmills. They were even crazier kaleidoscopes than all of those she had faced at the observatory, and judging by their vein-like cables, they were the ones devouring almost all of the electricity.

  “The Horn of Plenty!” murmured the Genealogists, each turning to a parabola.

  Lazarus, his eyes eclipsed by the glare from his spectacles, managed an indulgent smile.

  “En fait, no. These machines are there just to optimize it. The only true Horn of Plenty is right here!”

  With the flourish of an old conjuror, he indicated a cage in the center of the cavern, at the intersection of the two parabolas. The cage resembled an aviary. Apart from its generous size, it wasn’t that impressive in itself, but what it contained was even less so.

  There was nothing inside it.

  THE FALL

  It was only once Ophelia was close to the cage, hustled there by the Genealogists, that she realized that it wasn’t as empty as it seemed. Something tiny and shiny, barely more than the point of a needle, was floating in the middle of it. She thought of those flecks of dust that catch the sunlight along the slats of shutters, except that this one wasn’t frolicking around. It was still and steady. And a prisoner: the cage was padlocked.

  The Genealogists tensed up beside Ophelia; she could sense their muscles, their breaths, their powder, almost their thoughts.

  “Open it.”

  Their voices had lost all lasciviousness. They expressed raw desire.

  “Patience, patience!”

  Lazarus searched the pockets of his frock coat, one by one, before slapping his forehead with a chuckle, and extracting a key from his left sock. Ophelia couldn’t believe that, all this time, he had had something so precious concealed on his person, and there of all places. Someone else must have a copy. She peered up at the crisscrossing tracks carrying trucks around the cavern’s mining galleries. Although anything not lit up by the moving rainbows of the two giant kaleidoscopes wasn’t that clear, she could make out objects overflowing everywhere, and, even more so, hear the creaking of furniture, clinking of crockery, all the telltale cracked sounds of faulty goods. It was a tiny spark that had created all that?

  The click of the padlock drew her attention back to Lazarus, who opened wide the cage door, which was as high as him.

  “Before proceeding any further,” he said, puffing himself up, “I would like to make a statement.”

  Moving in perfect symmetry, the Genealogists pulled their pistols from Ophelia’s side to point them at him. Two shots. Two golden bullets, right in the chest. The impact threw Lazarus far from the cage, as the two shots resonated, endlessly. Ophelia felt as if this sound was echoing inside her. Thorn suddenly pulled her backwards, while the Genealogists, in a reverse impulse, moved toward the open cage, hand in hand, their smoking pistols still in their other hands. They didn’t so much as glance at Lazarus’s body, lying amid the parabolas’ fluctuating colors, his smile frozen. From now on, no one stood between them and the Horn of Plenty.

  “He had a plan,” Thorn whispered into Ophelia’s ear. “He must have had one.”

  The Genealogists entered the cage, like two phoenixes ready to be reborn, their faces turned up at that tiny spark full of infinity. They had but to reach out.

  “Give us eternity.”

  It wasn’t a prayer. It was a command.

  The Genealogists no longer moved. Thorn had stopped breathing, and the scarf wriggling. Lazarus was a corpse on the ground. The Horn of Plenty had expanded the very web of time by adding surplus seconds, minutes, hours, years to it. Or so Ophelia would have thought had she not heard her own heart pounding away, before something, at last, seemed about to happen.

  That something was the appearance of an aureole around the Genealogists, whose eyes, wide open in ecstasy, watched their own glorious metamorphosis. The aureole darkened into a golden cloud that filled the whole cage. Their eyes widened even more, the cloud turned crimson, and Ophelia suddenly understood that it was their bodies—makeup, skin, organs—that were scattering in thousands of tiny pieces. No cry came from their gaping mouths, and soon there were no more lips at all. The Genealogists had become a haze that the spark was sucking up, little by little, molecule after molecule, like a ventilation filter, until the cage was completely cleared.

  The Horn of Plenty had devoured them.

  The spark then began to shine even more brightly. It filled the cage with a new mist, silvery this time. With morbid fascination, Ophelia wondered if it might be aerargyrum. For it to be visible to the naked eye, it must be in highly concentrated form. Gradually, the mist changed appearance, took on colors, solidified, until men and women were materializing from it. The echoes incarnate of the Genealogists. The cage was full of them. Their bodies were misshapen, their faces hardly recognizable. Faulty copies.

  Ophelia and the scarf shuddered. Was that, then, the true power of the Horn of Plenty?

  “We’ve got company,” Thorn said to her.

  Footsteps could be heard from the depths of the cavern, where all the shadows overlapped. People were approaching. When they stepped into the electrical light of the kaleidoscopes, Ophelia’s shock was even greater than all the shocks she had experienced up to now. Ambrose was heading toward them. He was contorting, more than walking, but he was there, upright, very much alive, in flesh and beaming smile. He wasn’t alone. A second Ambrose followed him into the light, then a third, then a fourth, and soon a throng of lookalikes was emerging from the darkness. They all looked similar, and yet each was dissymmetrical in their own way. They were all the echoes incarnate of an original Ambrose, who had disappeared forty years ago.

  They didn’t say a word to Ophelia and Thorn, but greeted them with a friendly nod of the head as they passed. Many automatons escorted them, all carrying coded plates and toolboxes. They regrouped around the cage and, with gestures that had been repeated a thousand times, they cleared all the echoes out, without rushing them, but taking care, above all, not to linger inside, and then reclosed the padlock. As soon as an Ambrose placed a plate on the back of an echo, its appearance changed. The Genealogists’ features faded away—nose, eyes, ears, hair, flesh, muscles—until they had lost their last remnants of humanity.

  “Automatons.”

  Ophelia’s voice was flat. She thought back to the implosion of Hugo in the amphitheater, and to the factory in which they had sought refuge, to escape the patrols. None of all that was authentic. It was all just artifice, to prevent the citizens from knowing the true nature of the automatons. Lazarus had probably never created a single one in his life. He had used a simple code to turn real echoes into fake machines.

  Now that she was looking at them differently, Ophelia realized that the form of several of the automatons here was familiar to her. Some reminded her of Mediana, others the Knight. Some were hitting their left ear, mimicking a habit that had lost all meaning. And others carried on their shoulders a replica of the mechanical creature of their former proprietor: a beetle, a monkey, a lizard . . . Among them there was even the mechanical parrot, now mute, that had enabled Ophelia’s crystallization in the chapel.

  If there was no one left at the Deviations Observatory, it was because all of its occupants had passed through the door of the cage. Was that the last stage of the Alternative Program, or a desperate act to escape the final collapse of the world?

  Ophelia had exhausted her capacity for surprise. She didn’t even bat an eyelid when Lazarus’s corpse sat up, coughing and chuckling, and then versions of Ambrose helped him to his feet.

  “‘Everything that enters into the cage transmutes.’ That’s what I was about to say when those two impolite creatures cut me short.”

  Lazarus straightened up his pink
spectacles on his nose, and then pulled out a metal plate, concealed under his frock coat. The pistols’ two bullets had lodged in it, but not managed to pierce it.

  “You knew,” said Thorn, his voice heavy. “You knew exactly what was going to happen.”

  It was hearing him say these words that made Ophelia aware of the abrupt reversal of the situation, and it wasn’t in their favor. They were underground, far from everything, facing an unpredictable spark, surrounded by an army of echoes incarnate in the service of a single man—the most fearsome of them all. The danger was no longer the Genealogists; it had never really ever been. The danger was Lazarus.

  “Only the broad outlines!” he responded, with a mischievous expression. “I mainly trusted my pinky.”

  He waggled the little finger in question, indicating to someone behind them to come hither. Second moved forward through the morass of rainbows. Was she the only person from the observatory not to have been turned into an automaton in their absence? Left to her own devices, she had lost her bandage, revealing a scabby gash cutting across her nose, like a gory smile. Thorn became even more tense, and Ophelia knew that he was forcing himself, above all, not to look away. And yet there was a sudden harmony about Second, as if, despite their contradictions, all her features had finally agreed to express the same excitement.

  For the first time, she wasn’t carrying any drawing materials, no paper, no pencil.

  She walked resolutely between Ophelia and Thorn, obliging him to limp to one side to avoid another claws accident, and made straight for Lazarus. She stared at him with her white eye wide open.

  “The extreme horizontality escapes through all the veins of the side aisle . . .”

  Paying no attention at all to Second’s burbling, Lazarus proudly placed his palm on her head.

  “If I can glimpse certain echoes in advance when dreaming, it’s nothing compared with that eye. Second has never managed to establish a dialogue with the echoes and induce a crystallization, but she deciphers them better than anyone. At first, Lady Septima saw the deviation of her power as shameful, and then as a pretext to infiltrate my observatory. She thought that by doing so she was serving the Genealogists, but it was to me that she was giving a present that was absolument fabuleux!”

  “And they kiss the cherries while striking insomnia . . .” Second continued, unperturbed.

  From an inside pocket, Lazarus pulled out his wallet, its leather giving off a ghastly smell, and took out a photograph, faded by time, warmth and damp. He handed it to Ophelia. It was the snap of a drawing pinned to a wall. Its realism was disturbing. It depicted very clearly the Horn of Plenty’s cage, and its spark glinting inside it, along with three people beside its wide-open door: Lazarus, Second, and a woman. A small woman in a gown, wearing glasses and a scarf.

  Ophelia would have liked to do to this photograph what she had done to the drawings that came before it—throw it into the toilet, tear it to pieces—but Lazarus took it back from her to return it to his wallet.

  “It’s thanks to my little Second that I’ve never lost faith in the future. I knew that what we are living through today was going to happen sooner or la—”

  “You’re a hypocrite,” Thorn interrupted him. “‘Putting an end to the servitude of man by man’? How many of them have you sacrificed on the way?”

  Lazarus managed an indulgent smile, but it was to Ophelia that he directed it. He couldn’t get to grips with Thorn.

  “I have never sacrificed anyone. None of those who had the privilege of entering this cage died from it. They still exist, but in a way that your mind and your senses can’t conceive.”

  “And it directs the spaces until the bottle contracts—”

  “They have been turned into aerargyrum,” Lazarus added, in an excited voice that drowned out Second’s. “And the echoes produced by this transmutation have themselves been turned into solid matter. It always works like that, I presume it’s a question of balance.”

  Ophelia’s eyes were aching from popping out of her head. She was imagining molecules of the Genealogists floating all around her as gas. Maybe she was even breathing in some of it. What Lazarus described was, to her, worse than death.

  The tone of the professor’s voice suddenly became that of a storyteller.

  “Thousands of years ago, in the Babel of old, an imperial city was built, above our heads. During the work, the builders discovered a cavern, and inside that cavern, a minuscule particle of light. For how long had it been there? No one knew, but whoever approached it was swallowed up by it, and then regurgitated in the form of two monstrous echoes. A cage was constructed.”

  Just two, Ophelia thought, surprised. The Genealogists had generated many more echoes than that.

  “We don’t know how our distant ancestors used this discovery, but they finally blocked up the cavern. The Horn of Plenty became legendary. And one day, much later on, in a Babel ravaged by war, the army accidentally found it when searching for deposits in the basements of the ancient imperial city.”

  Lazarus was telling his story as though reciting it to himself, and was so carried away he even forgot about the Index.

  “It was the start of some extrêmement extensive experiments. The army observed that, in proximity to reflective materials, the particle expanded.” Lazarus indicated, in turn, the gigantic parabolas that made the kaleidoscopes spin. “The more the particle expanded, the more numerous the echoes. Eulalia Gonde herself has stood right here!” he exclaimed, resisting the urge to kiss the ground at his feet. “The bombardments put an end to the experiments, the Rupture shattered the old world, and the Horn of Plenty sank, once again, into oblivion. Until I pulled it out! The concept of transmutation is hard to accept,” he admitted. “That’s why I planted a fake factory in the town center, and a self-destruction code in my automatons, in order to protect the secret of how they were made. The day when I will finally be able to make public my research, without shocking public opinion, is close. Ambrose!”

  The adolescents fussing around the new automatons immediately turned to Lazarus.

  “Let’s give a little demonstration for our guest.”

  “Yes, professor.”

  Their gentle voices resonated like those of a choir, under the cavern’s lofty vault. Ophelia felt the scarf tensing up at the same time as she did. None of them would ever be the Ambrose that they had both got to know. These Ambroses were content to imitate a defunct model: their eyes were empty, vacant even to themselves.

  “And the wall is a white perfume that derails . . .” spouted Second.

  One of the Ambroses took out a key, which was then passed from one deformed hand to another until it reached an Ambrose standing near the cage. The padlock was reopened. In a chain of repetitive movements, objects were brought over from a convoy of trucks.

  It was the same ritual every time. They placed a perfectly sound object into the cage: a chair, a sack of rice, a pair of shoes. They waited for the object to be decomposed, and then recomposed by the spark. Next, they collected barely recognizable versions, which only took definitive form once a seal was applied: wobbly chairs, weevily rice, unwearable shoes.

  Thorn studied the process with intense concentration. Even now, trapped in the bowels of the observatory, he was only thinking about how to use this spark for his own ends.

  Lazarus delicately flicked his handkerchief over one of the cage’s bars, as if dusting the frame of an old master.

  “The code only serves to stabilize the echo in its matter, and correct its imperfections, as far as possible. Without it, the echo wouldn’t last long. From just one offering, the Horn of Plenty produces a multitude of duplications. It’s very economical. En fait, it can even reproduce new echoes from an already materialized echo, but, alas, the further one goes from the original model, the more the duplicates feature design flaws.”

  To illustrate what he was sayi
ng, he tapped the turban of an Ambrose with eyes where his ears should have been, and an upside-down nose.

  “The Ambrose who lived with me for all those years belonged to the first generation of echoes. You see, my old friend had volunteered to enter into the cage. He wanted to be transmuted into aeragyrum, live the experience from within. His scientific curiosity was second to none! In truth, ma chère,” he said, winking at Ophelia, “that echo of him that you got to know was but a pale imitation. Similar, certainly, touching, too, but an imitation all the same. In some ways, he was my very first automaton, long before Walter. For that alone, I will miss him greatly.”

  “And there are curtains that rain behind every comet . . .”

  Ophelia felt totally disgusted, a revulsion caused by Lazarus alone. He was so absorbed in his own story that he paid no attention to Second’s nonsensical one.

  “But that’s all in the past!” he exclaimed, rubbing his hands. “You are one of us, now, ma chère, you and your echo. You’re going to reproduce the miracle that Eulalia and the Other performed right here, centuries ago: create echoes incarnate that won’t be lackluster versions of their originals, but, on the contrary, will surpass them in every respect. If our family spirits were originally ordinary humans, just think what marvels we could achieve. Unlimited delicious food! Paradise-like lands as far as the eye can see! A society of men and women who can just dedicate themselves to the arts, philosophy, and personal fulfillment! Our names will go down in History forever, the History that matters, the one with a capital H.”

  All of Ophelia’s weight had sunk into her sandals. This old, powerless man had counted entirely on her to set himself up as a heroic figure, but she hadn’t the remotest idea what she was supposed to do. Communicate with an echo whose existence she had only glimpsed four times? Expect instruction from it that would initiate her into the universe’s greatest truths, known and unknown? She wondered how she could have only envisaged using this Horn of Plenty to restore Eulalia Gonde’s humanity to her, and send the Other back into the mirror.