The Memory of Babel

by Christelle Dabos

  Once Ophelia had climbed the steps to the main building, she could read the motto on its pediment:

  PRESTIGE AND EXCELLENCE

  She had barely set foot on the marble floor of the reception hall before a man politely indicated that she should turn back. “Forgive me, young lady, but you can’t enter.”

  “I’ve come regarding the request for applications.”

  The man seemed disconcerted. He glanced warily at the white toga and Ophelia’s reddened skin before showing her back to the door. He pointed out to her, on the other side of the estate, the vast bridge that straddled the void. “You have come to the wrong ark, young lady. This is where Pollux’s virtuosos reside. You must go over to the building for Helen’s virtuosos.”

  Ophelia really didn’t fancy any more walking. Her sandals hurt her feet, and her nape was roasting once again in the sun. No exotic illusion at the Pole’s court had ever made her this hot. She crossed the bridge, long and wide as an avenue, and reached the twin ark. It was as if the builders had duplicated here all the buildings on the other side, before stripping them, one by one, of their grandiose style. Marble had been replaced by rough stone, stained-glass windows by frosted glass, and no embellishment enhanced the overall appearance. There were no automatons, either.

  If the buildings were made in the image of Babel’s family spirits, Pollux was king of the esthetes, and Helen queen of the ascetics.

  Even the weather was less radiant, and Ophelia was soon engulfed in a rising tide of clouds that had appeared from nowhere. Hindered by steam clinging to her glasses, she struggled to find the stairs to the administration department.

  On the pediment, the motto of Helen’s virtuosos differed from that of Pollux’s:

  MAKING KNOWN AND KNOW-HOW

  This time, Ophelia wasn’t turned away upon entering. An attendant at the reception examined her papers without a word. She then led her to a study room where two other applicants, a man and a young girl, were each bent over a desk.

  The attendant supplied Ophelia with writing materials. “Copy out the different definitions of the word ‘definition.’ Find a synonym for each one, and copy out their definitions, too. It’s just a simple exercise to check your knowledge of the alphabet.”

  Ophelia looked at the dictionary that had been handed to her. She would have preferred a glass of cold water.

  As soon as the attendant had closed the study-room door, the man brought his desk closer to that of the adolescent girl. “And so, you were saying?”

  “My mother forced me to come here,” the latter hissed, angrily turning the pages of her dictionary. “Me, I asked for nothing, I never ask for anything, I’m always the one who obediently does what is expected of her. And . . . and . . . ”

  “And?” the man encouraged her.

  “And my mother, she became a citizen solely on her own merit. Now she wants me to follow in her footsteps. To do better, even. She’s forever repeating to me that I must become a virtuoso, while, at the same time, calling me useless. And . . . and . . . ”

  “And?”

  Ophelia looked up from her dictionary, having lost her concentration. The man was still moving his desk closer to his young neighbor. He was eyeing her greedily, hanging on her every word, as though there was nothing in the world more fascinating than what she had to tell him.

  “And apparently they give you a hard time here,” the adolescent continued, needing no encouragement. “And you have to study night and day, and even that’s never enough. And the more you apply yourself, the more they humiliate you. I’m fed up with being humiliated. No,” she added, sounding different, suddenly seeing the light. “I’m fed up with my mother. I’ve no reason to be here.”

  With these words, the adolescent crumpled her sheet of paper and left the study room, slamming the door. Looking triumphant, the man put his desk back in its place and, sensing Ophelia’s flabbergasted eyes on him, blew her a kiss with his fingertips.

  “Don’t judge me too harshly, mademoiselle. Our test starts right now, doesn’t it? That’s the tough law of competition.”

  “You influenced her,” she acknowledged, eyebrows shooting up.

  “I’m a Pharoan, charm is my family power. I entice others, irresistibly, to confide in me. I wouldn’t want to discourage you, mademoiselle, but I’m the greatest extractor of information in all of Babel. The ideal Forerunner!”

  Ophelia was relieved to hear the attendant calling the man for his interview. She hadn’t been able to stop herself from finding him charming, proof that his power was formidable. If he managed to seduce the examiners with the same ease, she didn’t stand much chance.

  She tried to return to her dictionary, but struggled to get on with the exercise. She had lost her concentration. Initially, the path to access the Memorial’s Secretarium had seemed straightforward. Now, the doubt cast by Ambrose and the Pharoan was having its effect. Who was she even to hope to join Babel’s elite?

  She attempted, somewhat in vain, to smooth her unruly curls. Maybe she shouldn’t have cut her hair with shears after all.

  Ophelia was called by the attendant, who took her sheet of paper and showed her into a new room. A pair of examiners sat in the hatched light of louvered shutters, both behind an imposing marble table. The man had slanted eyes that betrayed great intensity, and the woman was deathly pale, verging on blue; they weren’t descendants of Pollux, but everything about their appearance showed that they were no less citizens of Babel.

  “Take your place.”

  The seat indicated by one of the examiners, on the other side of the table, was a stool with intertwined legs. Ophelia knocked it over trying to sit on it. As a first impression, it was just great.

  “Your name?”

  “Eulalia,” replied Ophelia, straightening up the stool.

  “Do you have references? A letter of recommendation? Professional experience?”

  “No.”

  Mentioning her work at Anima’s museum and her being in service at the Pole’s court was out of the question. If she wanted to escape God’s attention, here she had to be Eulalia, just Eulalia. And Eulalia had no past.

  “Young lady,” the woman continued, “you must understand that the Good Family is an establishment specializing in the perfecting of family powers. We accept people of all ages and all backgrounds, but it is rare, extremely rare, that we take on those without power. You are going to have to be convincing.”

  “She’s not powerless.”

  The man had replied in Ophelia’s place, to the latter’s surprise. He linked his hands on the table and focused his slanting eyes, black and shiny as ink, on her.

  “I detect several family powers amalgamated within her. And not very evenly distributed. Don’t be so anxious,” he added, more gently.

  An Empathetic from Al-Andaloose. It was a family that Ophelia didn’t know well—she would have been hard-pressed to locate their ark on a map—but she knew at least one thing: their power allowed them to connect to the power of others. Rigid on her stool, she hoped she wouldn’t be too transparent to this man.

  “So you are of mixed race?” concluded the woman, to Ophelia’s relief. “Normally, powers from different lineages rarely work well together. But maybe not in your case. We are listening, young lady. In what way would you make a good Forerunner? What are your skills?”

  Ophelia was well aware that she was starting with a definite disadvantage in the eyes of the jury. “My dominant family power is Animism.”

  “Animists are not common on Babel. Are you able to animate any object?”

  “Particularly objects I know well.”

  “You would be able to repair material damage?”

  “I can heal my glasses in a few days.”

  “Would you be capable of creating perpetual movement?”

  “Movement, yes. Perpetual, no.”

>   The man and woman exchanged a look. Ophelia suspected as much. To have the slightest chance of becoming a virtuoso, she would have to play the talent card, and thus run the risk of revealing her real self. “The Forerunners are the top specialists in information,” Ambrose had said.

  “I’m a reader.”

  “A reader,” repeated the woman. “Yes, I’ve heard about that particular aspect of Animism. You perceive ‘certain things’ by touching objects, is that it?”

  From the tone of her voice, Ophelia could tell that she didn’t take that power very seriously. If the man’s role was to be empathetic toward applicants, this woman’s was to be insensitive towards them. The bluish tinge of her skin was characteristic of the Selenites, a people who controlled the conscious and subconscious forces present in every human being. It was pointless to seek to flatter, cajole, or bewitch a Selenite. One had to convince them, period.

  Ophelia pushed her glasses up her nose and scanned the room, with its austere furniture, potted plants, pneumatic tubes, and serried punch cards, before settling on a cabinet in which trophies glimmered. Among them, some appeared particularly old.

  “Are they the property of the Good family? If you give me permission, I would like to evaluate one of them.”

  “You have our permission,” said the man.

  “We will choose one for you,” specified the woman.

  They selected a trophy on which the gold had faded considerably. There was no plaque on it, no inscription. It was impossible to guess who had won it, and for what.

  It was a perfect choice.

  Ophelia took off her gloves and took the trophy in her hands. She was instantly overwhelmed by a skepticism that wasn’t hers; it corresponded to the state of mind of the woman as she had taken the trophy out of the cabinet. It lasted but a fraction of a second as the tide of time carried her further and further back. She felt herself passing from hand to hand. The trophy was being shown as an example. It was being stolen to infuriate the management. It was being polished with utmost respect. It was being vandalized in rage. And then suddenly there was a burst of applause and booing; satisfaction mixed with embarrassment; and, muttered into the ear, inaudible to the rest of the crowd, a hate-filled whisper: Everyone will soon forget you, you powerless thing.

  Ophelia placed the trophy on the table and looked the two examiners straight on. “It’s a first prize for excellence awarded to a virtuoso. Not any old virtuoso: a powerless one. Today it is held up as an example, but this prize was highly controversial at the time. Originally, there was a plaque,” she added, pointing at the base of the trophy. “It was torn off by a rival in a fit of jealousy. On it was written: ‘Awarded for the great merits of your theoretical and experimental research on the analytical machine.’”

  The two examiners exchanged another look, but made no comment. They were both so impassive, Ophelia couldn’t tell whether she’d made a strong impression on them, or not. She didn’t even know what an analytical machine was.

  The woman returned the trophy to the cabinet, and handed Ophelia a fountain pen. “We ask all applicants to sign the register. Before doing it yourself, I would like you to read this pen.”

  Ophelia gripped the gloves she was about to put back on. “You expect me to supply you with information about the other applicants?”

  “It will be your final test.”

  “I can’t read a possession without the consent of its owner.”

  “The Good Family is the owner of this fountain pen, as it is of these trophies,” the woman said, gesturing at the cabinet. “There’s no difference.”

  Ophelia contemplated the object for a long time; a ray of sunlight, suddenly escaping through the shutter, bounced off the gold of its nib. Her final test.

  She buttoned up her gloves. “I’m sorry, madame, there is a difference. These trophies belong to the past. The future of their owners doesn’t depend on what I might divulge about them.”

  The woman pursed her lips, and it seemed to Ophelia that the network of her veins became even more prominent beneath the bluish pallor of her skin. The ray of sunlight, swallowed by a cloud, went out like a flame on the nib.

  “Sign and go, young lady.”

  “Should I leave you a contact address? I’m currently staying at the son of Mr. Laza . . . ”

  “That will not be necessary,” the woman interrupted her.

  As Ophelia was scribbling a clumsy “Eulalia” on the applications register, she felt a lump rising in her throat. The examiners each wrote down a grade on the same piece of paper, which was then slipped into a cartridge and sent to a different department via a pneumatic tube.

  As soon as she got out, she dived into the closest restroom and splashed water on her face.

  She hadn’t been able to stop herself. Once again, her professional ethics had had the upper hand. She had just let slip away her only chance of accessing the Memorial’s Secretarium, of researching into the “ultimate truth,” of unmasking God, of finding Thorn again, and all out of consideration for whom? Applicants who didn’t hesitate to use their own powers to get rid of the competition.

  “Mademoiselle Eulalia?”

  She had barely left the restroom when a young girl had approached her. A student, going by her uniform.

  “Yes?”

  “Kindly follow me, please. Lady Helen would like to converse with you.”

  Ophelia was no expert on family spirits. Out of the twenty-one in existence, she had known only two up until now, and both those encounters had left her with a memorable impression. When she entered Lady Helen’s office, she knew that this occasion would be no different.

  The chair the family spirit was sitting in was linked to a tentacular mechanism. Dozens of articulated arms were humming away, one opening the drawer of a filing cabinet, another raising the cover of a hoist, and another emptying the contents of a pneumatic tube. Some were gathering pending correspondence to the left, others collecting dealt-with correspondence to the right, and all without a lull.

  The first thing that struck Ophelia, once the surprise of this mechanical ballet had faded, was that Helen didn’t remotely resemble the statues one saw of her in the city, standing magnificently to the right of Pollux. Her nose and ears were elephantine, as though the gigantism afflicting her had concentrated on those parts of her anatomy. In general, nothing seemed normally proportioned in this family spirit. Her head was too large compared with her body, her fingers too long compared with her hands, her bosom too generous compared with her torso. She looked like a huge caricature brought to life.

  Ophelia felt her stomach lurch when Helen stamped a paper, placed it on the pile of dealt-with correspondence, and then slowly raised her eyes in her direction; they had completely disappeared behind an optical appliance of crazy complexity. Her slender fingers, similar to a spider’s legs, removed two detachable lenses from among the dozens that were stacked on her huge nose, as if that would allow her better to see the little visitor who was standing on the other side of her desk.

  The student escorting Ophelia closed the door, and turned the spoked handle several times; it was as if she were closing a vault from the inside. The thousand and one little sounds that filled the conservatoire—pounding of feet, raising of voices, banging of doors—were instantly smothered under a triple layer of silence. Now that Ophelia thought about it, owing to the luminous globes, there wasn’t a single window in the office; merely a strange periscope that descended from the ceiling.

  “Howard Harper.”

  Helen’s voice had suddenly reverberated against all the marble and metal in the room. It was a voice so grating, so drawn out, so sepulchral that Ophelia wondered for a moment whether she was attempting to call up a spirit.

  “That was a time when the powerless still had family names,” Helen continued, systematically articulating each syllable. “Today they have all sunk into obliv
ion. All apart from one: Harper. Even I, endowed with an appalling memory, know that particular name. And you, young lady, do you know it?”

  “No, madame,” replied Ophelia, puzzled. Where was this conversation leading her? Was this the usual procedure for every applicant?

  “Howard Harper is the man who contributed to building the place you are in right now,” said Helen, leaning heavily against the back of her chair. “Before him, this little ark was nothing but a jungle shrouded in clouds, and only one virtuoso conservatoire existed: that of my brother and his dear offspring. I, myself, was never able to have children. Of all the family spirits, I’m the only one to be infertile . . . and that’s not the only defect to afflict me,” she added, with an ironic tone that made her voice even more grating. “Howard Harper is the one who showed me a different path. He was my very first Godson.”

  “The trophy,” murmured Ophelia.

  Helen considered her through her stack of lenses. The golden glint of an eye, tiny as a star, so distant did it seem, shone from the other side. “The trophy, yes. With a bare minimum of education, you would have immediately identified its owner. I listened to your so-called evaluation from here, and I found it woefully incomplete. Lack of historical knowledge, absence of dates, anecdotes devoid of relevance: your family power is interesting, but you, young lady, you are an ignoramus. If you had fallen into the trap of the examiners by reading the fountain pen, you wouldn’t even be here in my office.”

  Ophelia squeezed her hands tight behind her back. She had received all manner of insult during her life, and of much greater cruelty, but this one hit her straight in the heart. Reading objects was the one field in which she was gifted. Being criticized for her abilities awoke in her a sensitivity whose existence she’d not even suspected.