The Memory of Babel

by Christelle Dabos

  The sky here was no more real than it was at the house. Mommy had told Victoria that one had to go along many roads and many stairs to see it, but that it was so cold, that sky, that it would instantly turn her fingers to ice.

  Victoria never felt really cold or really hot when she journeyed, but she’d go to see the sky another day. The Golden Lady had just disappeared into a lift at the end of the road, and Victoria had to hurry to get into it, too. Huddled in a corner of the lift, she watched her with increasing curiosity. The Golden Lady was no longer smiling, but the way she held herself was very funny: sometimes, she tilted her head excessively to one side, or then scratched her hip by stretching her arm behind her back.

  Looking down, Victoria suddenly noticed her shadow. Or rather, her shadows. The Golden Lady seemed to have lots of them, swarming around her feet like living creatures. Were they one of her surprise illusions? Victoria hadn’t noticed them earlier, these shadows, with her other body’s eyes.

  She followed the Golden Lady out of the lift and had to walk behind her for quite a while—fortunately, Victoria didn’t get tired on journeys—before entering a tiny house with her. The place looked like the little studio to which Mommy would retire for a couple of hours a day to do her embroidery. There were dummies’ busts, a large blackboard covered in chalk-written notes, and a counter twice Victoria’s height.

  But not an illusion anywhere.

  The Golden Lady closed the door behind her and picked up the receiver of a telephone on the counter. Victoria hoped something more interesting was going to happen soon; she was starting to get bored.

  “Change of plan,” the Golden Lady said into the receiver. “Our little runaway isn’t here, either. But I’m going to longer a bit linger. Linger a bit longer. No, my child, I prefer to remain discreet. This Madame Cunegond isn’t yet coffee table—comfortable—but she may open more doors for me than anticipated. Tell all my dear children to remain vigilant. Every day counts.”

  Victoria couldn’t understand a thing the Golden Lady was saying; her words reached her as though through water, and yet she was starting to feel a little uneasy. The Golden Lady’s mouth didn’t hesitate at all anymore. Victoria had followed her this far because it had seemed a fantastically fun adventure, but, in fact, she wasn’t having that much fun. She could just make out, in the Other-Victoria’s ear, Mommy’s tiny voice, fretting—“the little darling gets increasingly lost in her daydreams”—and could feel, like the lightest touch, her warm hand stroking her hair.

  She was just about to return to having Mommy’s warm skin against hers when the Golden Lady pulled aside a drape behind the counter to go into a back room. Victoria’s curiosity meant she couldn’t resist following her. The call of the journey was, once again, strongest.

  She froze when she saw the Golden Lady leaning over a Second Golden Lady. She wasn’t seeing double, as with the carriage in the road. This Second Golden Lady was reclining on a large, white carpet and staring wide-eyed, a smile of pure joy on her lips, her veil and its pendants spread around her like a beautiful golden puddle.

  Red water was trickling out of her nose and ears.

  She was watching, without seeming to see them, bodies as transparent as the smoke from a hookah pipe, totally naked, half-woman and half-man, who were whispering words against her lips that only she could hear.

  Victoria understood nothing of what was unfolding before her eyes.

  With a single gesture, the First Golden Lady shooed away the naked bodies floating around the Second Golden Lady. “That illusion was perhaps a little too strong for you,” she told her. “You, my poor children, are such fragile creatures!” With her red-taloned hand, she closed the Second Golden Lady’s tattooed eyelids. “Rest in peace, my dear, your death was not in vain. Thanks to your face, I may succeed in swirling the wave. Saving the world.”

  With these words, the First Golden Lady slowly raised her head toward Victoria. She didn’t seem to see her, but she was squinting and staring at the corner of the room where she was, as if she sensed her presence. All her shadows immediately began to writhe and slither under her feet, as if wanting to hurl themselves at Victoria.

  “And you, my child? Would you also like to help me save the world?”

  The next moment, everything had disappeared: the two Golden Ladies, the white carpet, the back room. Victoria had returned to being the Other-Victoria at the house. She was strapped once more into the too-narrow baby chair. Mommy, smiling, was holding a spoonful of jam out to her.

  Victoria opened her mouth to scream. Not a sound came out.

  THE SLAVE

  Ophelia took off her glasses and gave her stinging eyes a long rub. After so long staring at text, she could see printed words even with her eyes closed. As she stretched in her chair, she looked up at the ceiling. Or rather, at the ground. Visitors were walking upside down there, moving silently between the library shelves. She always found it strange to think that it was she who was up above, and they who were down below.

  She closed her book, and then checked, one last time, the catalogue entry she had just written. No print date, no mention of a publisher, and some worthy unknown by way of an author: evaluating this monograph had been a real headache, forcing her to keep switching between ocular reading and manual reading. She opened the compartment of the phantogram and saw, with relief, that nothing new had arrived. She couldn’t have handled one book more.

  She glanced furtively through the latticed partitions separating her reading cubicle from her neighbors’. The Seers were bent over their books, in the haloes of the lamps. Of Zen, hidden behind her piles of ministerial archives, all one could see was a porcelain forehead beaded with perspiration.

  Only Mediana sat with arms crossed in her cubicle. She was watching Ophelia with amused curiosity. “You’ve finished your quota, signorina? Me, too. Let’s go and do our holes together.”

  Ophelia gathered up her index cards. As if she had the choice . . .

  They deposited the catalogued books on the counter of the Phantoms, who, in truth, were hardly ectoplasmic. Endowed with impressive girths and brick-red coloring, they owed this name to their family power, which allowed them to transform any object from a solid state to a gaseous one, and vice versa. Once “phantomized,” the most voluminous documents could circulate by pneumatic tube, so it was possible to dispatch an entire collection of encyclopedias from one end of the Memorial to the other, in the blink of an eye.

  Ophelia flipped from the ceiling to the wall, and from the wall to the ground, before taking one of the eight transcendiums serving the atrium. She didn’t check whether Mediana was following her; she could hear her boots clicking behind her. It was a taunting sound that accompanied her permanently, wherever she went, pursuing her even in her nightmares. Since this Seer had placed her hands on her, her life had ceased to be her own.

  The sunlight pouring through the rotunda disappeared as soon as Ophelia moved into the shadow of the Secretarium. The gigantic globe of the old world floated weightlessly above the hall, as close and as inaccessible as it was in her dreams. Much as she passed, back and forth, beneath this globe, she couldn’t spot an opening in it. There was but one possible means of access: a gangway that led from the northern transcendium to a door that blended in so well with the illustrations on the sphere, it was invisible from the ground. The gangway was guarded by a sentry, relieved every three hours; it was deployed with the aid of a special key, of which very few individuals at the Memorial possessed a copy. Lady Septima only entrusted hers to her son, and, on more rare occasions, to Mediana and Elizabeth, when Sir Henry required their services.

  Ophelia would have loved to know what had to be done to get into the good books of this automaton, who directed the reading groups without ever leaving his Secretarium. She still hadn’t met him, but once or twice she had chanced to hear the echo of his mechanical step on the lower floors of the globe, when
the database—the punched cards of which were all stored in the Secretarium—broke down. Sir Henry gobbled up bibliographical references as a greedy pig does pastries. The rate of cataloguing he imposed on them was intolerable, and the entries never detailed enough for his liking. Ophelia couldn’t count the times she’d had to start some work from scratch again, after it had been returned to her stamped, in big, red letters, “incomplete.”

  Lazarus had created his automatons to put an end to the servitude of man by man. Ophelia would have had one or two things to tell him.

  She squinted. A cloud in the form of a snake flew through the air, went into a long spiral, and entered the terrestrial globe from the top. One could only see the glass tubes of the phantograms in the sunlight. They allowed documents to be sent straight into the Secretarium. For one crazy moment, Ophelia wondered if that might not be the best way for her to access it. The house rules strictly forbade the phantomization of human beings—only the most experienced Phantoms were capable of turning themselves into vapor without risking their lives—but she was desperate.

  “As long as I’m alive, you’ll never go up there,” Mediana whispered to her, pinching her chin to turn her eyes from the globe. “Let’s make a detour, my vescica is fit to burst.”

  Ophelia followed her under the peristyle and waited outside the door to the restrooms, as would an obedient dog. Never had she felt so humiliated. Her anger with Mediana didn’t, however, compare with that she felt with herself. She exchanged a stern look with her reflection, on one of the mirrors she could see through the half-open door to the toilet stalls. She had compromised Thorn, no more, no less.

  “I’m not going to beat about the bush. You are not productive.”

  Hearing Lady Septima’s voice ringing through the peristyle’s arcades, Ophelia stood to attention. In her haste, she scattered all her index cards at her feet. Not saluting a teacher, or, even worse, a Lord of LUX, meant instant punishment: she’d learnt that lesson through chores and detentions. It was not, however, to her that Lady Septima had just spoken, but to the old sweeper of the Memorial, who was methodically dusting each flagstone on the floor.

  “It is the subsidies generously granted by LUX that maintain this building. Our Memorialists rely entirely on automatons’ orders. Accept it, their productivity is a hundred times yours.”

  Ophelia raised her eyebrows, as she gathered up the cards she’d dropped. Lady Septima was waving a file under the nose of the sweeper—she was as short and muscular as he was tall and thin.

  “We are grateful for your loyal and faithful service, old man, but it is time to make way for the future. Sign this paper.” Lady Septima was the embodiment of authority, her eyes and gold braiding making her blaze like a sun. And yet the sweeper simply shook his head.

  Ophelia felt an instant, irresistible liking for him. Inside the pocket of her uniform, Thorn’s watch opened and closed its cover with a resounding click. The impertinent noise made Lady Septima swivel round.

  “Apprentice Eulalia, do you not have work to do?”

  If Ophelia’s hands hadn’t already been occupied picking up her cards, she would have squeezed the watch tight to stop it reoffending. It was becoming animated with increasing frequency, snapping its cover all over the place. For a poor, broken mechanism, it wasn’t short on repartee.

  “I do, madame.”

  “You don’t look as if you do. I was proud of your slight progress at the end of your probation period. You have slackened lamentably since then. Do not rest on your wings—they can be withdrawn from you at any moment.”

  Ophelia held Lady Septima’s piercing gaze through the dark rectangles of her glasses. If this woman was as observant as her family power predisposed her to be, she would have suspected what was going on within the division of Helen’s Forerunners.

  Maybe she did know about it.

  “I will see to it that Sir Henry increases your reading group’s quotas,” Lady Septima declared, moving off with a military step. “Your colleagues will be most grateful to you, Apprentice Eulalia.”

  A group punishment—Ophelia really needed that. Even so, she couldn’t refrain from giving a quick smile to the sweeper, who turned his big beard almost imperceptibly toward her without stopping his meticulous dusting.

  “I’m going to end up thinking that you like being punished, signorina.”

  Ophelia’s muscles all tensed at once. Having just come out of the restrooms, Mediana had leaned against her back with all her weight, so as to keep her kneeling in the middle of the scattered cards on the floor. Ophelia couldn’t see her smile, but could imagine it from the feline purring of her voice.

  “Watch out,” she whispered in her ear. “Jinx straight ahead.”

  Ophelia looked up, mortified. Blaise had abandoned his returns trolley right in the middle of the atrium to make a beeline for her. Mediana backed away as he got nearer. The assistant’s bad luck was notorious: wherever he was, whatever he was doing, a bookshelf would always collapse, or a lamp explode, as he passed.

  Blaise crouched down to help Ophelia pick her up her cards; in his haste, he banged his forehead against hers. “Mademoiselle Eulalia,” he greeted her with a hesitant smile. “I tried so hard . . . You were never . . . Bon, I’m pleased to speak to you at last.”

  It was, indeed, the first time they were speaking since their encounter in the birdtrain. And for a very good reason: Ophelia had scrupulously avoided bumping into him at the Memorial. She absorbed herself in her cataloguing when she heard his timid step close to the reading cubicles; she turned back whenever she came across his trolley around the corner of a corridor. He seemed so anxious to engage in conversation, he whose company everyone shunned, that she despised herself a little more every time she avoided him.

  “Sorry,” she muttered, not daring to look him in the eye. “My apprenticeship takes up all my time.” She silently implored him not to persist, to leave it at that. How could she make him understand that he mustn’t confide in her anymore? Sensing, out of the corner of her glasses, Mediana’s thrilled interest in the two of them was unbearable.

  Blaise leaned even further, his moist, hedgehog eyes obstinately searching for hers. “Mademoiselle Eulalia, if you would just accept to grant me even but a moment . . . ”

  Ophelia took her cards out of his hands with such brusqueness that Blaise wouldn’t have looked more shocked if she’d torn his heart from his chest. “Sorry,” she repeated. She couldn’t be more sincere.

  He raised his shaggy eyebrows, dumbfounded, and then a flash of understanding crossed his eyes. A painful understanding. “No,” he said, slowly moving backwards. “It’s I who am sorry.”

  He went off again with his trolley, back hunched, but not without accidentally wheeling it over the foot of a visitor in the wrong place at the wrong time. Right then, Ophelia would have liked to have her formerly long hair back again; the disadvantage of short curls is that one can’t hide behind them.

  “Aha, might I have missed a passing fancy among your countless secrets?” Mediana whispered to her, leaning on her shoulder. “Your poor husband, if he knew . . . ”

  Ophelia couldn’t contain the deep dislike she felt any longer. Her claws had proved powerless before a dozen assailants, but they repelled Mediana with no trouble at all. The tomboy steadied herself with a pirouette and burst out laughing, as if she had just experienced a mere amorous rebuff.

  “Ah, yes, I was forgetting. A little bit Dragon, our Animist.”

  “One word more,” Ophelia said, through gritted teeth, “and I will put a stop to this blackmail myself.”

  Mediana’s smile twisted into a pout of sincere sorrow. It always went like that with her. One moment masculine and insolent, the next sweet and feminine, as if she wore two carnival masks in turn. “I think it’s time we had a little talk, noi due. Let’s go and do our holes.”

  In the Memorialists’ jarg
on, “doing holes” consisted of turning the handwritten entries into punched cards for Sir Henry’s database. With the card-punchers being noisier than typewriters, a soundproof room was specially allocated to them in the basement, so as not to disturb the readers’ peace. The ideal place to speak away from eavesdroppers.

  “First, let’s check your work.” Mediana had said these words as soon as she had turned the wheel of the compressed-air door and reassured herself that there was no one else in the card-punching room. Perched on a stool, she went through Ophelia’s index cards, one by one. “You’ve improved,” she noted, with an appreciative whistle. “Your contextualizations are increasingly precise, bravissima!” She unscrewed the cap of a fountain pen and started crossing out every entry that Ophelia had spent hours cataloguing. “This should render your results a little less satisfactory.”

  “Sir Henry will return it all to me, once again.”

  Mediana’s eyes started to shine with the same brilliance as the precious stones set into her skin. The more Ophelia’s glasses darkened, the more Mediana’s face lit up. “It’s funny, you speak of him as if you feared angering him.”

  “I do not believe that an automaton can get angry,” Ophelia retorted, in a muted voice. “But that’s not the case with me. Only the best accede to the Secretarium; by preventing me from doing well, you’re making me waste my time. I didn’t come all the way to Babel to be a slave to your caprices.”

  “Yes, I sense that you’re finding the situation rather tricky,” Mediana sighed. “So I’m going to reveal to you why I care so much about becoming a Forerunner.” She returned the cards to Ophelia and placed her own on the stand of a card-puncher. This machine resembled an actual piano, with its winding stool and fine ivory keyboard. The noise it made at every touch, on the other hand, wasn’t particularly musical. “Because the Forerunners know everything about everybody,” Mediana sang out, above the din of the punching. “And it so happens that I’ve developed a real addiction to secrets!”