She looked at Thorn, drawn up to his full height between her and the cage. His endless shadow was like ink spilling from his heels. He was silently staring at the tiny spark before him, so close and out of reach. He couldn’t grab hold of it, or even approach it, and yet his body was taut as a bow that can’t give up on its target. He was searching, at all costs, for a solution.
As for Second, she had gone quiet.
It was then that Ophelia was struck by something that was suddenly obvious. Thorn didn’t feature in the drawing that Lazarus had shown her.
“Watch out!”
It was as if Second had been waiting for that signal. She rushed at Thorn, who swiveled round to her with a grinding of metal, eyebrows arched in surprise. He was twice her size, and not a man easy to destabilize. Had his assailant been someone else, he would have used his claws without any qualms, but Ophelia saw something flash across his wide-open eyes—an immediate choice to be made. He allowed himself to be pushed backwards. His leg brace exploded in a clatter of steel, screws, and bolts.
Thorn had fallen inside the cage.
Ophelia shot up like a spring. She had stopped thinking, she was now but a primal reflex. Get him out of there. Now. Now. Arms stopped her in full flight. It was the Ambroses, who, at the click of Lazarus’s fingers, had grabbed hold of her. She beat them away with her fists, her teeth, her claws, but as soon as she got rid of one arm, two others took over.
Now.
“Get up!”
Ophelia could see very well that Thorn was trying to. She saw him struggling with his overly stiff body, snarled in a chaos of metal, hindered by an intractable leg. She saw him, yes, but she screamed at him, all the same.
“Get up! Get up!”
Now.
“Help him!”
Lazarus shrugged his shoulders, helplessly. At the threshold of the cage, Second stared with her blank eye at this man writhing at her feet.
“But this well was no more real than a rabbit of Odin,” she said to him.
Thorn froze. An aureole appeared all around him; his own flesh was disintegrating. He turned his long, bony face toward Ophelia, who was fighting off the Ambroses with her elbows, desperate to reach out to him. He looked deep into her eyes, nailing them with his most resolute look, in ultimate defiance, and then he disintegrated into thousands of particles.
Ophelia stopped fighting, screaming, existing. She watched, without flinching, as the haze—composed entirely of Thorn—was sucked up by the tiny spark, and, seconds later, the materializing of several echoes, standing in the cage, watch in hand. Distorted and inexpressive caricatures who weren’t Thorn. Who would never be him.
Just as the Ambroses were about to follow the usual procedure, Lazarus stopped them.
“No,” he said, gently. “Not these ones.”
The echoes, without a code to keep them materialized, gradually faded away. There was nothing left of Thorn; not even a bit of fingernail, or a single hair.
Ophelia was suffocating. Her veins were burning. She was on fire. Her survival instinct told her to control her breathing, fill her lungs with air, but she couldn’t anymore. Her body’s vital mechanism had broken down. Her vision became blurred, and she felt herself tipping inside herself, far, very far back, well before her birth, to where all is cool, and calm, and forgotten.
Standing in the middle of the cavern, Eulalia wipes her glasses for the sixth time.
As each new bomb smashes into the observatory, right up there, at ground level, the stalactites shower her with rock dust. There is no one around her, but the ground is strewn with rifles, submachine guns, grenades, flamethrowers, and antipersonnel mines. With the toe of her military boot, Eulalia pushes them away. All of these weapons are unusable replicas, failed echoes. Happily, they will never kill.
Those who wanted to use them are dead, somewhere up there.
She should have understood sooner the true finality of the Project, and its absurdity. She should have known that her superiors had never had any intention other than to produce ever more weapons. Their experiments were, in any case, destined to fail. The echoes aren’t intended to make up for the shortcomings of human beings.
Eulalia shakes off the rock dust that settles on her lenses. She survived the deportation of her family, exile from her country of origin, famine, illnesses, and bombardments. Every night, before falling asleep, she repeated to herself that all this had a meaning, that she was destined to slip through the net of all catastrophes in order to save the world from itself.
Today, she understands that, above all, she had been very lucky. The luckiest thing of all was encountering her Other through a telephone receiver.
“You changed my point of view on things.”
“Changed things,” crackles the echo from the walkie-talkie she wears on her belt.
Eulalia smiles.
“Conceited.”
She slips off the straps of her satchel, and from it carefully takes out a thick exercise book. Her most personal manuscript: a play. She has put all of herself into it. The ink contains her blood and sweat, and she used her hair to sew the binding. She wrote this play over recent weeks, without a typewriter, without her superiors knowing. Had they found it, what would they have understood? She encrypted the text using an old alphabet she had invented, her favorite one, the one with the lovely arabesques.
Hugging the exercise book to her chest, she advances slowly between the two giant kaleidoscopes, their perpetual motion splashing her skin with colors. At the point where their radiance intersects, within the makeshift barbed-wire fence, and barely visible to the naked eye, she finally glimpses it: the Horn of Plenty.
“A particle whose gravitational field takes apart any matter that comes near it, before turning it into a substance that can be modeled at will.” That’s the definition of it her superiors had given her. Thanks to the Other, Eulalia knows how mistaken they were, she knows why they only produced faulty copies of weapons and soldiers, and why she won’t make the same mistakes.
She places the manuscript within the barbed-wire fence and moves back until she’s out of the spark’s reach. Already, the binding is disintegrating into a cloud of paper. These pages written by her own hand, with her own blood and her own sweat, contain the beginning of a story, that of her future children. That’s what Eulalia gives to the spark: words. In return, she expects an intelligent life from it. Twenty-one lives, to be precise.
Because her superiors were wrong; the Horn of Plenty has never been a particle.
It’s a hole.
Ophelia took in a big gulp of air; she had remembered how to breathe. A variety of misshapen Ambrose faces peered down at her. In among them was Lazarus, smiling at her.
“I must admit, ma chère, you almost had me worried. I thought you’d had a heart attack. I may have a Horn of Plenty at my disposal, but you’re the only person in the world I can’t replace.”
Ophelia became aware again of the ground beneath her knees, the scarf twitching around her neck, the commotion of the trucks in the galleries, the mineral smell of the cavern, and the light effects of the kaleidoscopes. She was there, once again, and yet she was missing what was most important.
Lazarus offered her his elbow, attentively.
“I rather envy your husband, you know? He is experiencing what every explorer hopes to experience one day. Contemplating our reality from a perspective that no human will ever be able to access! If we didn’t have so many wonders to achieve, you, your echo, and I, I’d happily invite you both to join me there with him.”
Ophelia stared intently at him, through the double glazing of their glasses.
“Bring him back.”
Her voice, strained from screaming, didn’t seem to be her own. Nothing belonged to her anymore, and she no longer belonged to anything.
Lazarus sighed, with understanding.
“The process is irreversible. Honnêtement, I don’t know why Mr. Thorn wasn’t part of our plan, but what could we do? The advance echoes are never wrong.”
Ophelia wasn’t listening to him anymore. She ignored the elbow he was so keen to offer her, made her way through all the Ambroses, and went up to Second, still standing on the threshold of the cage, backlit by the spark.
“Why?”
The young girl held her gaze without flinching, with her normal eye and her blank one.
“But this well was no more real than a rabbit of Odin,” she repeated.
Then, after what seemed like a supreme effort, she managed to say:
“You . . . must . . . turn back.”
The Horn of Plenty floated, indifferently, in the midst of the rainbows. Helen’s words, in the stand of the amphitheater, came back to Ophelia: “You should go beyond the cage. Turn back. Really turn back. There, and only there, you will understand.”
“We mustn’t waste any more time,” Lazarus said to her, his spine protesting as he straightened up. “We must establish communication with your echo as soon as possible, so it can reveal to us the real operating method of the Horn of Plenty. Telephone, s’il vous plaît!”
An automaton immediately brought a telephone, sitting on a cushion, its cable endlessly unwinding from the depths of the cavern. Lazarus unhooked the receiver to hand it to Ophelia. There was infinite tenderness in his every gesture, his every look.
“I’m sure your echo is just waiting for a word from you, ma chère. It will reveal to you not only how to create plenty, but also how to overcome your own limitations, so that you can, in turn, pass it on to what remains of humanity. Eulalia lacked ambition, content merely to give us family spirits. She should have guided every woman and man onto the path of crystallization, taught them how to awaken their echo’s consciousness, and elevate themselves to a state of omnipotence! That may even be why she lost control of her Other. If there’s one person in the world capable of stopping it, it’s you.”
Ophelia seized the receiver. She put it back on the hook, pushed Lazarus into the cage, and went in with him.
“No!”
Lazarus hurled himself at the door that Ophelia was just closing. Too late: she had already fastened the padlock. It was ironic to think that, if the observatory hadn’t healed her of her clumsiness, she would probably never have managed to do so in time.
Lazarus rummaged in his frock coat, searching for the key. His pink spectacles fell off his nose, shattering as they hit the ground.
“You can’t! The plan! You mustn’t!”
It was the first time Ophelia was seeing him in the grip of rage, but that was as nothing compared with how she felt toward him.
So it was to Second that she addressed her last sentence, through the bars:
“I’m turning back.”
A radiant smile emerged under that of the gash. For the first time, Second felt understood.
Ophelia hugged the scarf to her chest, ashamed and relieved that she had dragged it into this cage with her. She wondered if it was going to suffer, as she looked up at the spark, looming down on her.
Not a spark, no. A hole.
Ophelia held her breath. A mist was rising from her gown and her gloves. She readied herself for getting her body through the eye of a needle. Thorn had boarded that long-distance airship for her; now it was her turn.
Lazarus, still searching in all his pockets for the key to the padlock, froze when he noticed the drawing that Second was holding up, right under his nose. It was the one from his wallet. She tore it.
That was the last thing Ophelia saw before being blown to smithereens.
THE WRONG SIDE
A searing pain. The sensation of being turned inside out, like a garment. And then tumbling.
Ophelia falls upwards. Gripping onto her scarf, she passes through what seem like strata of atmosphere, and the higher she goes, the more the falling accelerates. And yet she lands on her feet without a bump or a sound. She is surrounded by fog. She’s not hurting anymore, but she’s not sure if she’s still breathing.
Where is Lazarus? There’s no more cage, or cavern, or Second: nothing anymore, apart from the scarf and her. Ophelia looks at her arms and legs to make sure they are still there. Her skin has turned a shade of verdigris, as if she has become an old brass statue. She tugs at some of her curls. Blond. She tugs at her gown. Black. Even the colors of her scarf have been reversed. A beauty spot that, until now, had sat in the hollow of her left elbow, now nestles in the hollow of her right one. What is most disturbing is to see, without needing special lenses, the shadow of her family power enveloping all of her like foam. Ophelia unbuttons a now pale-blue glove, and sees the shadow intensifying around her reader’s fingers. At least she has been reassembled in the right order and all in one piece, already a miracle in itself. So the Horn of Plenty was, well and truly, a passage.
But a passage to what?
Ophelia swivels round a few times. There’s fog everywhere. Where is Thorn? She wants to call out to him, but something inside her refuses to do so. She moves forward through this intangible, limitless whiteness. She thinks she can see a rectangle in the distance, dim as a star behind clouds. No sooner has Ophelia’s attention been focused on it than it starts to get bigger, and bigger, as if it were rushing toward her, whereas it should really have been for her to approach it. The rectangle is, in fact, a half-opened door. Ophelia slips through it.
She enters into a room so foggy, she can only just make out the outlines of the furniture and the glimmer of the lamps. Fog aside, the colors of the place are natural, unlike those of Ophelia. The door she came through belongs to a wardrobe. With its chaos of disorganized files and its overloaded décor, she really struggles to recognize the treasury of the Pole. She has been transported to the other side of the world from Babel. Even the interfamilial Compass Roses can’t enable such leaps across space.
In the midst of the layers of fog stands the large desk that had so impressed Ophelia the first time she sat on the other side of it. It still bears the stain from when she spilt ink on it.
There’s a man sitting at it. A man who isn’t Thorn. The new treasurer? His coloring, too, is normal. Ophelia wants to announce herself, but, once again, the words stick in her throat. The man, in an over-powdered wig, is slumped in his chair. There is such an accumulation of newspapers, blotters, and files waiting on the desk, it’s like a fortress of paper before him. He doesn’t look at it, any more than he notices Ophelia, rudely peering over his shoulder. He’s doing crosswords; it’s all gibberish to her.
Not only has she lost her ability to speak, but also to read.
She has, on the other hand, developed a new sense that allows her to perceive the generally imperceptible. Something that’s at once infinitely subtle and strong is making the surrounding fog undulate. At every instant, the new treasurer projects his image, his chemistry, his density around the space. These waves go through Ophelia, which is neither pleasant nor unpleasant. She senses the form of this man, along with his powdery smell and the scratching of his pencil against his chin. He shows more interest in his crossword puzzle than in the telephone, which he leaves to ring on his desk. It makes a dampened, distant sound, but Ophelia feels every vibration as if she was made of the same substance. With a flick, she manages to make one of the waves move in the opposite direction. The ringing of the telephone then releases an echo, causing the new treasurer to frown.
Ophelia shakes her fog-covered hand under his nose, but he is unaware of her presence. Her existence is too different from his.
In any case, it’s not this treasurer she’s looking for—wrong person, wrong place.
Space immediately stretches out under Ophelia’s sandals. The new treasurer, the telephone, the crossword puzzle, the desk, the wardrobe move away from her until they are lost in the fog. This pervasive whit
eness is aerargyrum. Ophelia herself is made up of it, from head to toe. She can no longer express herself, and yet her mind has never been clearer. She instinctively grasps concepts that were hitherto unknown to her. What Lazarus calls aerargyrum is in fact inverted matter. The Horn of Plenty doesn’t transform those who pass through it; it turns them in on themselves. And the echoes produced by this inversion in turn invert themselves; a code only serves artificially to preserve the structure of their atoms, but, with or without one, balance is maintained.
New forms emerge around Ophelia. Motionless carousels. She is back at the Deviations Observatory, in the old amusement park of the Alternative Program. Aerargyrum shrouds both the sky and the ground.
Ophelia goes past the Fakir’s Game stand, in which she had sheltered with Thorn. If she knew how to, she would shout out his name.
She moves toward the tiger carousel. She can make out a figure, curled up between the wooden creatures. Mediana! The precious stones inlaid in her verdigris skin have taken on an unusual hue. She, too, was sucked up by the Horn of Plenty, and, just like Ophelia, has become a negative of herself. The mist of her family power floats around her body like her baggy pajamas. Unlike the Pole’s new treasurer, Mediana becomes aware of Ophelia’s presence and looks up at her. White irises stand out against the black corneas of her wide-open eyes. How long has she been hiding on this carousel? Her mouth can’t emit a sound. She holds her hand out to a shaken Ophelia. Mediana had been a torturer and a victim, but never had she asked for her help.
The aerargyrum creates a milky curtain between them. Ophelia can no longer see either Mediana or the carousel. She wanders around alone once more. Here and there, between two blank spaces, she catches a brief glimpse of other figures in the negative. Lazarus. The Knight. The young girl with the monkey. The beetle woman. The lizard man. Each time, Ophelia loses sight of them within seconds. She even has a fleeting vision of the Genealogists, first the man, then the woman, both searching for each other in the fog, unable to call out to each other. They seem totally disoriented by this limbo that leads nowhere. They wanted Plenty, they sought the ultimate truth, and here they are, left to their own absurd meanderings.
The Storm of Echoes Page 39