The Memory of Babel

by Christelle Dabos

  Ophelia went through it, to the other side.

  All that her imagination had conjured up of this inaccessible sanctuary was immediately shattered. The interior of the Secretarium was an identical copy of the interior of the Memorial. Galleries, served by transcendiums, were tiered in rings around a well of natural light. There was even, suspended between its atrium and its cupola, a terrestrial globe that was the exact replica of the one containing it. The architects had designed the entire place like a nest of dolls!

  In the galleries to the right, thousands of antiquities glimmered from the length of glass-fronted cabinets, illuminated by the cold bulbs of Heliopolis. In the galleries to the left, entire rows of cylinders turned on their axles, humming continuously. Ophelia knew that, around each cylinder, a punched card was rolled, and that each punched card replicated a document. The whole complex combination of cogs and gears resembled the workings of a hurdy-gurdy.

  “It’s true that you’re coming here for the first time,” commented Octavio, who was closely observing her every reaction. “The Secretarium, like the Memorial, is divided into two twin parts: the rare collections are stored in the eastern hemisphere, and the database in the western hemisphere.”

  “And this?” she asked, pointing at the globe floating above them. “A second Secretarium?”

  In spite of herself, Ophelia had broken her self-imposed silence.

  “Just a decorative globe,” answered Octavio. “Ah, here comes the head of your division.”

  She felt a surge of hope on seeing that Elizabeth was, indeed, crossing the atrium in their direction. She appeared more solemn than ever to her. Her tawny hair rose like a cape with her every step, and her face was even less expressive than usual.

  “Anything new?” Elizabeth had addressed this question solely to Octavio.

  “Nothing to report. No one entered the Memorial, or exited it, with the exception of Apprentice Eulalia.”

  “Very good. Let’s go.”

  Ophelia followed them, battling the vertigo that had beset her. Maybe it was the oppressiveness of the clouds over the cupolas, but she was starting to feel short of air. It wasn’t her descent into the catacombs that was behind this summons. It was something else that was even more serious.

  Thorn’s watch, afflicted by her nervousness, snapped its cover from inside a pocket of her toga. The question was no longer whether Mediana had betrayed her, but to what extent.

  They stopped in front of a compressed-air door. “We are not authorized to enter with you,” Elizabeth explained, after opening it. “All that takes place in there is highly confidential. Good luck.”

  “Luck doesn’t exist,” Octavio chipped in, coldly. “We alone are the authors of our destiny. But that,” he added, in a hushed voice, “Apprentice Eulalia already knows.”

  Ophelia knew nothing at all, and that was precisely the problem. With wary steps, she entered an austere room, seemingly designated for consulting documents. It boasted, as its sole piece of furniture, a large lectern made of precious wood, over which Lady Septima was leaning.

  “The door,” she ordered.

  Ophelia turned the steering-wheel-shaped handle until the lock clicked. It was so cold inside, she felt as if she were locking herself into an ice store. Her bare feet, in their sandals, started tingling, painfully, all over.

  “Step forward.” Lady Septima had issued this command without hesitation. Calm and distant, as ever. Slowly, she turned eyes blazing like two beacons in the dimly lit room toward Ophelia. “Do you like jigsaw puzzles?”

  Ophelia blinked. This wasn’t the interrogation she’d prepared herself for. Cautiously, she approached the manuscript on the lectern that Lady Septima was indicating to her. It was old, judging by its state of decay. The faded letters running across the page, in the few legible parts, were those of an unknown language.

  It was the pages of notes lying on the other leaf of the lectern that particularly caught her attention. “Mediana’s translation,” she acknowledged. “Why are you asking me about this, rather than her?”

  Lady Septima didn’t reply. Ophelia then felt every muscle in her body, which she’d been clenching since her birdtrain journey, relax to the point of making her unsteady. The anger she’d built up against Mediana evaporated in an instant.

  “What’s happened to her?”

  Lady Septima dropped the grin that had been stretching her mouth, ridding her face of any trace of personal feeling. “A division almost entirely composed of Seers, and not one among them capable of seeing the future of their own cousin. They bring shame on all the Frontrunners. In short,” she said, rallying herself with a lift of the chin, “Sir Henry demands to be provided with a replacement at a moment’s notice. Even if I have serious reservations about you, one has to admit that you are the fittest candidate for this work. The least incapable, anyway. You will have to prove yourself worthy of the honor that LUX is granting you, Apprentice Eulalia. I’m going to inform Sir Henry of your arrival,” she added, marching off. “You can cast a look at the manuscript, but do not, for any reason, touch it. Handling a document of this value is done according to a protocol that you have not yet mastered.”

  Lady Septima entered a lift at the back of the room; it rose with a grinding of gearwheels as soon as she operated the lever.

  Once alone, Ophelia leaned with both hands on the lectern and stared at length at the manuscript without seeing it. Waves of conflicting emotions crashed within her, making her glasses turn every possible shade.

  Relief. Incredulity. Exultation. Distress.

  Distress? After all Mediana had put her through, was it really possible that Ophelia felt concerned about her fate? She had become a Forerunner in order to find herself exactly where she stood right now; her real research could finally begin. She should have been overjoyed, so why was she terrified?

  It was an imperious click-click from within her toga that distracted her from her turbulent thoughts. Ophelia tugged on the chain of her watch in order to examine it. Now, the cover wouldn’t stop opening and closing, as if in the grip of an epileptic fit. Click-click! Click-click! Click-click!

  “Alright, calm down,” Ophelia muttered, as much to herself as to the watch. She blocked the cover with her thumb, but the hands immediately took over, spinning around in a frenzied waltz. At regular intervals, they all stopped at once, pointing, again and again, at the same time.

  Thirty minutes and thirty seconds past six.

  Ophelia turned to the lift, as its gearwheels had started up again. Sir Henry might be an automaton, but it wouldn’t make a good impression to wrestle with a broken-down fob watch in front of him.

  She blinked. The hands had suddenly changed time, now all pointing obstinately at exactly midday.

  No. The hands weren’t indicating the time. They were indicating a direction.

  Thorn’s watch wasn’t, never had been, broken down. It had quite simply turned itself into a compass. A compass of which the three needles, at that very second, were pointing at the arriving lift.

  The lift door opened onto Lady Septima and Sir Henry.

  Except that Sir Henry wasn’t an automaton.

  Sir Henry was Thorn.

  THE SCARECROW

  THE DISCOVERY

  Thorn stood in a corner of the lift, so excessively tall that his head touched the ceiling. His steely eyes, slashed by the long facial scar, were focused on a document he was busily flicking through. He paid not the slightest attention to Lady Septima as she showed him Ophelia, rooted to the spot in the middle of the cold room.

  “Our latest recruit, monsieur. I will personally see to it that she proves equal to the situation.”

  The rules required Ophelia to stand to attention, trot out the traditional greeting—“Knowledge serves peace!”—and state her particulars, or risk severe punishment. She found doing so impossible.

  F
rom the moment Thorn had appeared, all thought had abandoned her. She clutched her fob watch with both hands: it was solid, it was tangible, it was real.

  Lady Septima pursed her lips, interpreting her silence as an untimely attack of shyness. “Apprentice Eulalia joined the second division of the company of Forerunners fifty days ago. Not much going on in the head, but her hands show potential.”

  Ophelia wasn’t listening to her. Lady Septima no longer existed. There was only Thorn, still at the back of the lift, frowning, deeply absorbed in some chart. His silver-blond hair was meticulously combed back; his face, long and angular, perfectly shaved. He was wearing an impeccably white shirt that, over both forearms, became work gauntlets, with built-in dials, gauges, and various other measuring devices. It was the emblem pinned on his chest, over his heart, that held all her attention. A sun.

  All this time, she’d been looking for a fugitive. She’d just found a Lord of LUX.

  With one step behind another, Ophelia backed into the most dimly lit corner of the cold room. Even if her seething blood prevented her from thinking, one thing was perfectly obvious to her. Whatever would occur, when Thorn’s eyes finally met hers, would have irreversible consequences.

  “We’re taking too long over the projected schedule. The Genealogists will end up demanding explanations.” Thorn had spoken these words with the Babel accent, devoid of any Northern lilt, just like a native of the city. And yet Ophelia would have recognized his voice out of a thousand. The resonance of a double bass, solemn and sullen, that echoed through her inner emptiness, shook her to the core, welled up to her throat, choked her.

  Thorn’s voice after nearly three years of silence.

  Ophelia jumped when he closed his document with a sharp snap.

  “Furthermore, I need the Necromancers here urgently. The temperature and the level of humidity are becoming too high in the eastern hemisphere of the Secretarium. We are losing staff, let us avoid also losing collections.”

  Thorn’s attention shifted directly from his charts to the old manuscript on the consulting lectern. As he crossed the cold room, a sinister creaking accompanied his every step. Ophelia hadn’t noticed it until then, but now it stared her in the face: an iron frame, articulated like a skeleton, caged one of his boots from ankle to knee. The leg that had been broken during his time in prison.

  The automaton.

  Rarely had Ophelia felt so stupid. She had taken literally what had only ever been a tasteless nickname. Tasteless, and yet entirely apt. Thorn leant stiffly over the lectern, and then turned, methodically, between the metallic fingers of his gauntlet, a page of the manuscript.

  “Does your recruit know ancient languages?” He had addressed Lady Septima as if the person in question wasn’t in the room. This dreadful habit, which so exasperated Ophelia at the time of their engagement, today felt more than welcome to her.

  “She doesn’t know them, monsieur. However, I feel she is still capable of taking over from Apprentice Mediana. She’s an Animist. A reader.”

  “Here we go,” thought Ophelia, whose glasses were growing bluer before her very eyes. “He’s going to turn toward me. He’s going to recognize me.”

  Thorn did no such thing. He merely examined the page, nibbled by time like old lace, that he held with his fingertips. “Would she know how to restore the missing text?”

  “No, monsieur,” Lady Septima declared, with the assurance of the teacher who knows her pupil better than the pupil knows herself. “On the other hand, she could reconstruct the substance of it by penetrating the thoughts of those who have read it. Ideally, of the person who wrote it.”

  Ophelia was struck by the way her fiery eyes stared at Thorn’s caliper, as though trying to melt down the metal. Lady Septima seemingly treated him with the respect owed by a member of LUX to a peer, but she didn’t consider him her equal. Which, to Ophelia, didn’t bode well.

  If Lady Septima detected the slightest reaction between Sir Henry and herself—a movement of surprise, however small—she would instinctively be suspicious, and their false identities would be blown apart, thought Ophelia.

  She forced herself to breathe in slowly. To still the turmoil in her heart. Return her glasses to transparency. Relax the muscles in her face. Straighten her shoulders. She couldn’t stop her body from shaking, but never mind. She was in a cold room, in a toga and sandals; shivering was a normal physical reaction.

  All that remained was to hope that Thorn wouldn’t choke on seeing her.

  “Where is Apprentice Mediana now?” He had asked this half-heartedly, while leafing through the translation notes. The lectern’s lamp cast a cold light on his profile, making the steep slope of the nose, the furrow of the long scar, and, between the narrow half-opening of the eyelid, the focused eye, all shine.

  “She was transferred, monsieur.”

  “Will she resume her work here one day?”

  “Giving an opinion on the matter would be premature.”

  “Mediana is alive” was the only coherent thought Ophelia could muster at this point in the conversation.

  “And what are your thoughts on the case of Mademoiselle Silence now?”

  “I don’t understand your question, monsieur.”

  Thorn turned from the consulting lectern. “One apoplectic attack within our ranks is what I call a regrettable incident. How would you describe a second one?”

  “A regrettable coincidence, monsieur.”

  They were both impenetrable, but Ophelia detected a tension that was gradually building. If Thorn’s expression remained inscrutable, that of Lady Septima betrayed disgust. At no moment had she deigned to look up at him, insisting on staring at his crippled leg. Did she even know that the man before her was endowed with a phenomenal memory and ferocious claws? He was two heads taller than her, but she saw him as a greenhorn who would forever be inferior to her, and not just due to their age difference. Ophelia realized that she behaved the same way with the old sweeper, Helen’s Forerunners, and even Mediana. All those who weren’t Pollux’s descendants were, for Lady Septima, merely the necessary parts for the smooth functioning of a machine, and it was advisable to replace them when they became deficient.

  “We will have to increase the pace of the reading groups,” Thorn finally declared. “The Genealogists are growing impatient, and neither you nor I wish to see a surprise inspection by them. Particularly right now, with these sort of . . . coincidences.”

  It was the second time the Genealogists had come up; if Ophelia had no idea who they were, she at least understood that they were at the apex of the LUX hierarchy. And that Thorn didn’t want to have dealings with them.

  “All leave will be suspended until further notice,” Lady Septima said, banging her heels together. “The readings will start earlier and finish later.”

  “As long as it’s not to the detriment of the detail. Your students still produce too many inaccuracies, and I’m not talking about the encoding errors.”

  Lady Septima assented, but her face had hardened. Ophelia was suffering agonies. Thorn clearly didn’t realize that offending this representative of God, here and now, was the last thing that, in their position, they should be doing.

  As was to be expected, Lady Septima sought someone on whom to take out her annoyance. She didn’t have to look far. “Apprentice Eulalia, are you just going to stay forever twiddling your thumbs? Stop causing me trouble and prove to Sir Henry that you will live up to his expectations.”

  Ophelia felt as if her blood had suddenly stopped circulating through her body.

  Thorn had finally turned toward her.

  He had turned toward her and his eyes expressed nothing. Neither surprise nor bafflement. The neutral look that a stranger would direct at any other stranger.

  “I will not disappoint you,” she declared.

  Ophelia was relieved not to hear her voice crack.
She even surprised herself by handling, without shaking too much, the attention being focused on her, as if she were no longer really herself. Because she was no longer really herself.

  “I am Eulalia,” she repeated to herself, “and the man in front of me is Sir Henry.”

  It was as simple as that.

  Thorn’s long arm snatched Mediana’s notes from the lectern, and stretched to give them to Ophelia, covering the distance between them without needing to make even a step in her direction.

  The automaton.

  “You have three days to learn this translation off by heart, and be trained in the handling of ancient documents. After which you will come right here, every evening, after the reading groups. Three days—have I made myself quite clear, apprentice?”

  Thorn’s words fell down on her like hailstones. He wouldn’t have been more convincing if they had never met. So much so, in fact, that, as she clutched the pages of notes in her hands, she was gripped by an overwhelming doubt.

  Had he even recognized her?

  THE SUSPICION

  “I have nothing . . . to tell you.”

  “She was . . . our colleague. I have the right . . . to know.”

  “You’re . . . putting me off.”

  Ophelia was running with some difficulty in the dust of the stadium. It was six o’clock in the morning, the least hot and least muggy time of the day, but her lungs were already on fire. It gave her meager comfort to see that Elizabeth, although used to the daily circuits, was struggling enormously to put one foot in front of the other. On her head, the aspiring virtuoso had an extraordinary radio-hat that was spluttering out the repeat of a scientific program; it was supposed to help her to maintain her rhythm, but the weight of it slowed her down more than anything.