The Memory of Babel

by Christelle Dabos

  “Can I make a confession to you, mademoiselle?”

  “Er . . . yes?”

  Blaise leant over, shyly, and, over the racket of the rain, whispered in a low voice: “It was me who killed Mademoiselle Silence.”

  Ophelia felt her stomach lurch, and it was no longer due to the rocking of the carriage. She mouthed “Why?” unable to emit the slightest sound. Blaise withdrew again and slumped on the banquette, plunging his fingers into his already tousled hair, his features strained with guilt.

  “That’s not the question, mademoiselle. Ask yourself rather how.” He gave Ophelia a worried look, as if he feared she would suddenly smash the window and leap into the void to escape him. “I . . . I bring bad luck.”

  “Ah.” Ophelia could find nothing better to say in response. It was one of the most unexpected admissions ever made to her.

  “I’m serious,” Blaise insisted, staring with wide, tormented eyes. “The book trolley, Wolf’s accident, Mademoiselle Silence’s fall, this torrential rain: it’s all really me, you understand? It’s been that way since the day I was born. I defy all the statistics. People who are très competent have studied my case.”

  Blaise’s words went straight to Ophelia’s heart. They echoed those of Thorn, two and a half years back: “You have a preternatural predisposition to disasters.” She opened her mouth, but a roar cut her short:

  “Shame on you, lambkins!”

  Ophelia and Blaise turned around. The students were all exchanging stunned looks. As for the conductor, he had already seized his fine book and was searching, banquette to banquette, for whoever had dared to break the rules. He couldn’t find him.

  The voice rose up again, from nowhere and everywhere at once, louder than the thunder outside: “Yes, absolutely, lambkins! Look at you, with your fine uniforms! Look at you with your goody-goody textbooks! Look at you with your oh so proper language! And you dare to claim you’re the youth of Babel?”

  Ophelia blocked her ears to avoid being deafened. She’d heard this tenor voice before. It was that of Fearless-and-

  Almost-Blameless, the day she’d visited the Memorial.

  “Me, I’ll tell you what you are,” the voice continued. “Accomplices! Conspirators of silence! Dictators of right-thinking! If you still have a semblance of pride, citizens, repeat after me: down with the Index and death to the censors! Down with the Index and death to the censors! Down with the Index and d . . . ”

  The voice turned into a very shrill, crackling noise, piercing Ophelia’s eardrums. Eventually, the conductor had found a radio set under a seat, turned up to full volume, and had smashed it to pieces with his heel. Silence descended once more, heavy with rain, wind, and storm.

  “The incident is over, citizens,” the conductor declared, categorically. “Next stop, the Good Family!”

  With ears still ringing, Ophelia looked at Blaise, who had stood up from the banquette to allow her to leave her seat. He shrugged his shoulders, fatalistically.

  “As I told you, Mademoiselle Eulalia. I bring bad luck.”

  Ophelia stood up, trying to get her balance in the swaying. She looked at what remained of the radio set, which the conductor was picking up at the other end of the carriage. The voice still resonated within her: “Death to the censors!”

  “Mademoiselle Silence was actually the senior censor, wasn’t she?”

  Blaise raised his eyebrows, which were as pepper-and-salt and shaggy as his hair. “Eh? Yes, but . . . eh bien . . . you surely don’t think . . . ”

  “I don’t yet know what I think,” Ophelia whispered, as quietly and quickly as possible. “The only thing I’m almost certain of, Mr. Blaise, is that you’re not responsible for what happened to Mademoiselle Silence and Professor Wolf. I even think that meeting you here, in this birdtrain, has been really lucky for me.”

  Blaise stared wide-eyed. The corners of his mouth quivered, like a flickering candle flame. “It’s the first time in my life that I’ve heard someone say that to me.”

  “The Good Family!” announced the conductor.

  Ophelia shook the hand Blaise had politely held out to her, despite the encumbrance of her oversized gloves. “I have the firm intention of joining the reading groups,” she told him. “We’ll see each other again soon at the Memorial. In the meantime, take care, and ask yourself what really killed Mademoiselle Silence.”

  From the landing stage, Ophelia’s eyes followed the silhouette of the winged train as it continued on its path across the sky. The rain had stopped the moment it had pulled away from the ark. ‘I mustn’t,’ she thought, with determination. ‘Offering my friendship to a Memorialist would be unreasonable. Dangerous, even.”

  She was forced to admit, realizing she suddenly felt less alone, that it was already too late.

  THE WELCOME

  The articulated arms kept moving, like tentacles, around the principal chair. They were endlessly sorting the Good Family’s papers, and their perpetual motion made Helen’s stillness behind the imposing marble desk even more striking. The giant woman was staring at the file she was holding with her long, spidery fingers.

  Ophelia felt as if she’d been waiting an eternity for her verdict. She turned her attention to the desk lamp, which emitted a flickering light. She had screwed and unscrewed so many bulbs during the pre-morning chore, she had to control her urge to change this one.

  Helen’s cavernous voice gave her a start. “Going by Lady Septima’s report, you deigned to make some effort during your three weeks of probation.”

  Ophelia suppressed the words that came to her mouth. She wouldn’t describe two hundred hours of radio lessons and applied readings, not to mention all the chores, as “some effort,” but so be it. “I did my best, madame.”

  Helen lifted her elephantine nose from her file. In the midst of the mechanical ballet of her chair, she recalled one of those ancient goddesses with several arms, half-woman, half-monster, of whom one still found sculptures on Babel’s oldest walls. “Is doing your best enough? Lady Septima isn’t impressed, either, by your evaluations. You lose yourself in the subjectivity that permeates objects, but history is a science that demands rigor. We don’t practice vagueness here, we require context. You have shown signs of progress, I read it in your file. However, virtuosos mustn’t be good in their field; they must be excellent.” Helen’s mouth cracked into a grimace as wide and toothy as that of an abyssal fish. “Calm down, young lady, your heartbeats are hurting my ears.”

  “I will become excellent,” promised Ophelia, who was totally incapable of calming down.

  “I have two questions for you, apprentice. Here is the first: what have you learned during these three weeks of probation?”

  Ophelia had to admit that she’d expected something a little more concrete. In her head, she formulated all sorts of fine sentences, searching for the one that would most pleasing, but Helen interrupted her, abruptly:

  “Don’t think. Reply to me now, with total sincerity, in as few words as possible. What have you learned?”

  “That I know nothing.”

  The statement had almost sprung from Ophelia’s lungs. It wasn’t exactly what she had intended to say, but Helen gave her no chance to expand on it, going straight to her second question:

  “Why do you want to become a Forerunner?”

  “I . . . In fact, I thought—”

  “Why?” Helen’s voice was now more sepulchral than ever.

  “To put my hands in the service of the truth.”

  “In the service of the truth,” repeated Helen. “Might it not have been good form to say ‘in the service of the city’?”

  Ophelia allowed herself a moment’s thought, recognizing that she’d been given a chance to go back on her words, and then decided to follow her instincts. Helen wasn’t Pollux. Helen wasn’t the puppet of Lady Septima and the Lords of LUX. Helen thought for
herself and made her own decisions.

  “You asked for a sincere answer.”

  Helen then directed her optical appliance at Elizabeth, who was standing to attention near the door, so silently that Ophelia had forgotten she was there.

  “Remind me who you are.”

  “I’m . . . I’m in charge of the second division of Forerunners, madame. I coordinate the reading groups.”

  Ophelia couldn’t resist giving Elizabeth an astonished glance. In the three weeks she’d been around her, it was the first time she’d detected any uncertainty in her voice. Outwardly, however, she still had the same expressionless face, unhealthily pale behind its freckles, with the heavy eyelids of a sleepwalker.

  “That I already know,” Helen stated. “Why, otherwise, would you be attending this interview? What I want to know is your name.”

  “Elizabeth.”

  These four syllables, stiffly articulated, reinforced Ophelia’s impression. It was almost a distress call.

  Helen hit the piston keys of a keyboard. A mechanical arm instantly extended, telescopically, to open the flap of a writing desk at the back of the room. Ophelia was astonished to see that, on it, there was a giant book with pages as thick as skin.

  No, not a book. A Book, with a capital B. Helen’s Book.

  Ignoring it, the mechanical arm opened one of the writing desk’s many drawers and pulled out a register, which it placed on Helen’s desk.

  “A good system for a bad memory,” Helen commented, not without irony, as she flicked through the register. “Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Elizabeth . . . Ah, yes, you are the one without a power. Your virtuosity is with databases. Oh? It’s to you that I owe my personal consulting system? Yes, I seem to recall, now,” she declared, closing the register. “I think I can trust in your judgment. Do you think the apprentice here present is worthy of interest for the reading groups?”

  The silence that ensued made Ophelia feel uncomfortable. If her acceptance into the Good Family depended on Elizabeth’s opinion, it didn’t bode well. The division leader didn’t raise her nose from her algorithms often enough to know the apprentices she was in charge of. Her devotion to the city and the Memorial made her blind to the rest of the world.

  At least, that is how Ophelia saw her, so she was amazed to hear her reply:

  “I think she is worthy of interest, period, madame.”

  Pensively, Helen tapped the marble of her desk with her fingernail. Once, just once, Ophelia would have liked to meet her eyes, but she knew that was impossible: without her corrective appliance, this family spirit saw people as but a galaxy of atoms. Just as the room’s compressed-air door stopped her from hearing the muttering, sneezing, grumbling of the students of her conservatoire.

  With a resounding creak of leather, Helen leaned forward in her chair, and her enormous bosom followed suit. Her disproportionately long fingers placed a box in front of Ophelia. “Welcome to the Good Family. Be sure to close the door as you leave, you two. Your heartbeats are deafening.”

  A moment later, Ophelia was following Elizabeth down the stairs of the administration department, hugging her box. She felt a combination of relief and disbelief.

  “What you said to Lady Helen, did you truly think it?”

  Elizabeth stopped in the middle of the stairs, her hand resting limply on the banister. “Of course not. You are now indebted to me and I intend to take advantage of it.”

  During an uncomfortable silence, all that could be heard were the typists of the administration department, as fast and noisy as sewing machines.

  Elizabeth ended it by raising her half-closed eyes at Ophelia. “I’m joking. Of course I thought it. You’ll hear no one telling you so here, but you’re pretty talented with your hands. As a reader, at least.”

  Indeed, Ophelia had inadvertently dropped her box, which tumbled down the marble steps. Elizabeth picked it up, opened it, and took out two little silver wings. Without a word, she kneeled at Ophelia’s feet to pin them on to her boots. Her face had remained impassive, but her gestures had become caring. Almost maternal.

  “You are one of us, Apprentice Eulalia.”

  Ophelia felt more touched by these words than she would have expected to be.

  “Elizabeth . . . Lady Helen didn’t want to hurt you. Her memory . . . ” Ophelia only just held back the end of her sentence. Her memory was torn away by God, along with a page of her Book. She couldn’t reasonably reveal such information to a Forerunner. It would have been dangerous for them both.

  “She didn’t forget your name deliberately,” she said instead.

  “I know that.” Elizabeth had said these words with a sigh. Sitting down in the middle of the stairs, she wrapped her arms around her knees. Her face showed no emotion, but her slumped body, its lack of contours accentuated by the light from the windows, betrayed her overwhelming melancholy. “I know that,” she repeated, quietly, as though to herself. “That’s what the family spirits are like. The truth is that before arriving here, I was totally lost. A girl without powers and without purpose. Lady Helen gave me a home, a family, a future. She means so much to me, while I mean nothing to her . . . It’s not her fault, she is condemned to forget everything all the time. It’s for that reason that the Memorial is so important.”

  The evening gong sounded, and, as though turned into watch springs, Elizabeth’s legs unfolded to stand her up. “I must go without delay to the Secretarium at the Memorial. Sir Henry is expecting me there and, for him, a minute late is a minute too late.”

  “Will I meet him soon? As a new member of the reading groups, I’d like to introduce myself to him properly.”

  What Ophelia mainly wanted was a pretext for entering the Secretarium, but Elizabeth slowly shook her head.

  “Introduce yourself to the automaton? Believe me, he’s not some tourist attraction, and he doesn’t care a fig who’s working for him. Despite all the respect I owe him, he’s only an assemblage of calculations, analyses, and steel. One must, however, acknowledge that he transformed the Memorial’s catalogue. We live in the best of worlds,” she suddenly declared, solemnly standing to attention. Let’s see to it that, together, we make it even better, Apprentice Eulalia.”

  Elizabeth gave Ophelia’s hand a quick shake and left, allowing her no time to react. Which wasn’t such a bad thing, really. It was unlikely that she would have appreciated Ophelia’s opinion.

  Once she was alone on the stairs, it suddenly hit Ophelia that she’d succeeded. She’d become an apprentice virtuoso.

  She left the administration building and hurried along the walkway between the columns, pushed along by the searing evening wind. She marched so determinedly, monkeys scattered as she passed. The silver wings attached to her boots produced a metallic ring that punctuated her strides. Each step forward was a step toward God. A step toward Thorn.

  “Well done.”

  The haughty voice made Ophelia slow down, and then turn back. She had passed by Octavio without noticing him. Leaning against a column, in the midst of the creepers, he merged with the shadows that the setting sun was ushering across the gallery. Only his glowing red eyes indicated his presence.

  “Thank you,” Ophelia said, cautiously.

  It was unusual to see him alone. There was always a swarm of apprentices in his wake, ready to applaud his every achievement, as if student rivalries in no way applied to him; it was, of course, Lady Septima they were flattering, through him. Even the gallery’s megaphones went quiet in his presence. If he had been someone else, the voice of a supervisor would have soon requested him to return to the quarters of the Sons of Pollux.

  “Are those gloves to your satisfaction?” he asked.

  Ophelia opened and closed her hands several times, softening the new leather covering them. “They were delivered to me today. I’ll be able to continue my apprenticeship in a good position. I owe you one.” S
he had been deliberately familiar. The time for formality was over. From now on, she considered herself the equal of the other apprentices in her company; that this one was Lady Septima’s son made no difference to her.

  Octavio dragged himself out of the column’s shadow. The sun’s oblique rays lit up the bronze of his skin, the silver on his uniform, and the gold of his eyebrow chain as he advanced through the gallery. And yet that light was very pale compared with the incandescence of his eyes.

  “More than you think, Apprentice Eulalia. Was your visit to Professor Wolf edifying?”

  The question had the effect of a poisoned arrow on Ophelia. How naive she’d been! It wasn’t simply for the sake of some gloves that Octavio had instigated that encounter. “Well played,” she muttered. “I really believed that you’d helped me out of a concern for fairness.”

  “Oh, but I did. What happened to the professor could happen to others. I thought it fair that you know about it.”

  Ophelia tensed even more. From the start, a mutual mistrust had hovered between them, as formless and silent as fog. Now more than ever, she wondered to what extent Octavio wasn’t more God’s accomplice than his mother was.

  “What happened to him?” she asked, pretending to be surprised. “Are you referring to his accident?”

  She knew that there was nothing accidental about Professor Wolf’s injury, but acknowledging that would be like admitting that she’d pried into his private life, and that was precisely the trap she mustn’t fall into.

  Octavio studied her with an attention at once sustained and distant, much as he submitted the laboratory samples to the scrutiny of his eyes.

  “The dilation of the pupils, the duration of eye contact, the frequency of eyelash fluttering,” he whispered. “Our eyes say more about us than any speech could. And yours, Apprentice Eulalia, tell me that you’re lying. You lie all the time and to everyone. Even that gesture,” Octavio added, seeing Ophelia nervously straighten her glasses, “tells me a great deal about you. My mother sees you as just a clumsy rookie who, sooner or later, will end up losing heart. I, myself, know that nothing will stop you because you are here for a precise reason. A personal reason, totally unconnected to the interests of the city.”