Not anymore. His tirelessness was that of a man determined to succeed. Or rather, that of an automaton. Thorn never showed impatience, never a sign of satisfaction, never an attempt at humor, as if all human emotions hindered his productivity. Methodically, he made use of every new detail, however insignificant, that Ophelia brought to light through her evaluation. And that’s why she saw the piles of documentation accumulating, evening after evening, right across the Coordinator room. One had to wonder where Thorn found the energy to read all that on top of his work on the database! Ophelia better understood why he never left the Secretarium.
In the meantime, the weeks went by and she still didn’t know what exactly he was looking for in this caretaking register, or what his alliance with the Genealogists really consisted of.
“You still haven’t seen them?” asked Blaise with amazement, when Ophelia was asking him about them. “They’re real celebrities in Babel. Their every public appearance is vraiment an event.”
He was perched on a ladder to tidy up some shelves in the Memorial. Two meters further down, Ophelia pretended to consult a dictionary; she had given lexical research as an excuse to leave her reading cubicle for a moment. They were talking in hushed voices, almost without moving their lips, or looking at each other, each giving the illusion of concentrating on their work.
“I rarely get the chance to go out,” she said, turning a page of the dictionary. “Do they have as much power as people say they do, these Genealogists?”
“Mon Dieu, yes. They run a prestigious club that allows them to gather personal information on every inhabitant of the ark. In the general interest, they assure. They know practically everything on virtually everyone. Sooner or later, you’ll get an opportunity to see them at the Memorial. Avoid attracting their attention, mademoiselle,” Blaise whispered, turning his big nose in all directions. “They . . . They are people who are not as disinterested as it might appear.”
The concern evident in his voice touched her heart. She had been so relieved to see that Blaise hadn’t held their subterranean misadventure against her. Even if they had never mentioned it again in public, this secret had become the kernel of their friendship. Ophelia didn’t often have time to talk with the assistant, but every smile exchanged in a corridor kept her going.
This time, however, Blaise wasn’t smiling. He came down from his ladder, eyes wide with fear. “May I just give you some friendly advice, mademoiselle? I know that Forerunners like you have got information-gathering in the blood, but . . . maybe you should curb your curiosity. After what happened to your classmate . . . eh bien . . . I wouldn’t want to see you joining her over there.”
Ophelia trapped her fingers as she put the dictionary back on its shelf. “Over there? You know where they took Mediana?”
Blaise ran his hand through his hedgehog hair uneasily, as though regretting having said too much. That was the last thing Ophelia saw. Night descended upon her, accompanied by a incredible splattering sound. It took her a few seconds to realize that she was covered in ink. The dark, thick liquid was streaming through her hair, over her face, down her neck.
“Sacrebleu!” Blaise exclaimed. “I can’t believe it, my bad luck has struck again!”
Ophelia removed her splashed glasses and looked up. Just above her, hazy upside-down figures hastened stealthily away. That was no bad luck. That was a balloon thrown with enough force to defy the ceiling’s gravity and land bang on target.
“Don’t touch me,” she warned, as the assistant quickly handed her a handkerchief. “You’re likely to get inky, too. Check that the books are alright, I’m going to clean myself up.”
Ophelia spent a considerable time in the Memorial’s restrooms. She had to wash her face, glasses, and hair several times, and left her frock coat to soak in the basin. That band of Seers was seriously starting to annoy her. Requesting a new uniform would mean extra chores, and she really didn’t need that. While the material released its ink, Ophelia contemplated her reflection in the mirror. Her short hair stuck to her cheeks in dark spirals. She never got to look at herself at the Good Family as there were no mirrors there.
She looked different.
She could see it deep in her eyes, at the corners of her mouth, and even in the shaking of her body under her vest; a strain that wasn’t there before.
“I am Eulalia,” she murmured.
“I am Ophelia,” she thought.
But for Thorn, who was she really?
With a furtive glance, she checked there was no one else in the bathroom. She took a deep breath to calm herself, and placed her palm on her reflection. After a while, the surface of the mirror finally softened and the hand entered it, only to reemerge through the mirror of the neighboring basin. Then, slowly and in reverse, Ophelia pulled it out.
She was shaking.
The mirror had acquired the consistency of mud, as though it had tried to resist this intrusion. Would the double life Ophelia led in Babel end up making her lose her power? Or could it be a deeper identity crisis?
She pulled herself together when she heard the door creak and a step ringing on the tiles.
“My mother is looking for you, Apprentice Eulalia.”
Ophelia recognized Octavio’s voice. She held his gaze through the mirror for as long as he observed her through the black strands of his fringe. With the reading groups’ hours having been increased, the two divisions’ sessions were now combined. It hadn’t helped matters. Octavio was as mistrustful of her as she was of him.
“She finds your lexical research a touch long,” he added, not without a touch of sarcasm.
Ophelia would have liked to throw him out, but he had every right to be there. All the communal areas were mixed in Babel, including the restrooms. She pulled the plug in the basin and, as the water drained away with a loud gurgle, dried her frock coat. Luckily, the midnight-blue of the material prevented the ink stain from being too noticeable.
“You’re not afraid of being alone with me?” she mocked. “It’s here that Mediana was found in a state of shock.”
Octavio’s circumflex eyebrows went up. This slight lift took the golden chain linking his brow to his nostril with it. “I never claimed that you had attacked her.”
“No, just that I had been quick to take her place.”
“It’s rare to see you being so caustic.”
She chose not to react. Behind her, impassive as a sphinx, Octavio was studying her with almost scientific interest.
“What happened to your uniform? And to your arms?”
Ophelia quickly put on her frock coat, even though it was still soaked. Most of her cuts had healed, but a few had left marks that were quite obviously (especially to a Visionary) recent.
“What happened to them is that I don’t have my mother at the conservatoire to have my back.”
Octavio’s eyes widened and their fire instantly returned. She had touched a sensitive point. This young man wasn’t quite the extinct volcano he wanted to seem. Provoking him was perhaps not a good idea.
“I’m going back to my cubicle,” Ophelia announced. “I wouldn’t want to keep Lady Septima waiting any longer.”
Octavio restrained her by the wrist as she was about to leave. “For your information, I have received no favorable treatment from my mother. My good results are purely down to my own merit. I simply want to ensure that the same is true for every future virtuoso. Including you.”
With these words, he let go of Ophelia and turned his face away, as if he suddenly felt ashamed of his action. Relations between men and women were, like everything in Babel, highly regulated. Close contact couldn’t occur without the consent of a higher authority. At the Good Family conservatoire, it was, quite simply, forbidden.
For the first time, Octavio’s eyes avoided hers. “I’m a good person,” he blurted out, reluctantly. “I’ll prove it to you.”
When Ophelia returned to the shelves where the ink balloon had burst, Blaise was no longer there. Instead, an automaton was finishing cleaning up the mess, endlessly repeating: “A LITTLE GIFT GOES A LONG WAY BETWEEN FRIENDS.”
Pensively, she wondered what Octavio had meant by what he’d said to her.
That evening, in the Secretarium’s cold room, Ophelia seriously struggled to concentrate on the manuscript. Her eyelids were burning. Her days allowed her no respite, and sharing her privacy with fifteen hostile men didn’t help with getting a good night’s sleep. She could keep sliding her fingers over the old register, where the paper barely held together, but the caretaker was no longer speaking to her. Facing Thorn empty-handed was unthinkable, but it was no good—there was just endless tattered text, and no more Mediana to finish the translation.
After persisting a long while, Ophelia let her hands fall by her sides. She dozed off without even realizing it, standing there, at the consulting lectern. It lasted but a fraction of a second, a fleeting moment during which she saw herself floating weightlessly above the old world, so high up she could see the horizon taking on the curve of the planet.
Then, in the blink of an eye, she was reading:
“Soon that blasted rainy season, and that blasted dome leaking like a sieve, yet again, and that blasted jungle invading all me bedrooms, and them blasted brats not returning. What’s the point of sending them to that blasted city? What are they going to learn there, except that our blasted world is rotten? And what if they get lynched over there, despite their blasted powers? Dammit, how empty this blasted school feels without them.”
Ophelia felt no surprise at the time. Plunged into an altered state, she suddenly found it entirely natural to understand what was written in the register. She started to turn its pages, in one direction and then in the other, no longer following procedure, just her instinct. There, in the margins of the inventories, beside the columns of accounts, were the caretaker’s comments. They were the real substance of the manuscript.
“L. is getting on my wick with his blasted lights in the middle of the night. Curfew means curfew!”
“Them blasted brats have been quarreling all day. The war was a piece of piss compared with the shambles they’ve left me. School of peace, huh? Best of blasted luck to their future offspring.”
“Shit, J. has disappeared. For real, this time. With his blasted power, it was bound to happen. Shit.”
“False alarm, they’ve found J. On another blasted island. In perfect health. They’re indestructible, them blasted brats.”
“Little A. cadged a chat off me today. Couldn’t twig a blasted word she said to me. She did me a drawing. I think she’s after a telescope. Don’t know if these kids are going to rule the world one day, but learning the local lingo would be a darned good start.”
“Shit. Lost J. again.”
Ophelia turned the pages, unable to stop. She was in a trance. She felt as if she could almost hear the caretaker’s voice, grumbling in her ear, and she could sense, behind the abrasive words, immense affection. He had loved them, those “blasted brats.” Truly loved them.
The register ended abruptly on a final comment:
“He’s watching me closely. That blasted way he has of looking at me scares the pants off me. As if I was a blasted intruder in their blasted school. He ain’t like them blasted brats, that one. Must have a word with the head about it.”
Ophelia stared wide-eyed behind her glasses, totally awake this time. The text instantly returned to being impenetrable. It was, once again, nothing but a string of nonsensical letters. A language totally foreign to her.
“Apprentice Eulalia, your session is over,” the voice of Lady Septima announced through the acoustic pipe.
Ophelia turned to her still-blank report page, placed on a corner of the lectern. She felt not the slightest hesitation. She had to find a way of speaking to Thorn in private.
THE UNSAID
When Ophelia came out of the cold room’s lift, Lady Septima awaited her.
“You took your time. Let’s get going, apprentice.”
As usual, they crossed the Secretarium’s circular galleries together. Ophelia did her best not to show the excitement that made her want to run all the way to Thorn. She couldn’t resist a glance at the decorative globe floating weightlessly in the middle of the atrium. This evening, the old world had revealed a tiny fraction of its secrets to her.
Lady Septima entered the Coordinator room and handed the evaluation to Thorn, unconcerned about interrupting him in the middle of his plugging and unplugging. Normally, Ophelia merely lowered her eyes. Not this time. She stared intently at him as he opened the envelope, unfolded her report, and took in its contents with systematic impassivity. His eyes briefly met Ophelia’s, and then he turned to Lady Septima.
“Leave us alone.”
“Pourquoi? If my pupil has made a mistake, I need to know about it and take the appropriate measures.” Imperiously, she held out her hand for the evaluation report, but Thorn put it away in one of the Coordinator’s drawers. Away from prying eyes, however powerful they might be.
“If you don’t mind, monsieur, I would like to take a look at it,” Lady Septima insisted. “I undertook to find you a translator; my responsibility . . . ”
“ . . . is not in question,” Thorn cut in, “since there is no mistake. The fact is, you just don’t need to know the contents of this report.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Ophelia clenched her toes inside her boots. It was curious to note how four words could take on the opposite meaning, depending on how they were said. Lady Septima was mortally offended. Octavio was really just as fired up inside as his mother: behind their self-restraint, they were consumed with pride.
As for Thorn, he was an iceberg. Totally still on his stool, he showed nothing more than a cold indifference. The metal tips of his fingers were drumming on the wooden console of the Coordinator. It had taken a while for Ophelia to understand that those gauntlets he always wore were made of an alchemical alloy that prevented electrocution. Plugging and unplugging cables all day long wasn’t a risk-free occupation.
“The evaluation of that manuscript was commissioned by the Genealogists,” Thorn said. “I received instructions; so did you. You had to find an interpreter and you fulfilled that task well beyond your duty. All that will be said in this room today will be of the utmost confidentiality.”
Lady Septima pointed at the stripe on Ophelia’s shoulder. “This inexperienced apprentice, who may never even become a Forerunner, would be better informed than me?”
Thorn stood up. Lady Septima, who usually looked down on people from on high, suddenly appeared tiny.
“If you have any objection to that, I would advise you to speak directly to the Genealogists.”
This prospect succeeded in convincing Lady Septima to swallow her pride. She clicked her heels, made for the exit, and then turned one last time toward Ophelia. Her complexion had turned pale and, conversely, her fiery eyes had become incandescent. She seemed to be using her family power to sear into this apprentice who dared to know something that she herself didn’t. Ophelia did her best to withstand this intrusive glare, but was relieved when Lady Septima finally left, closing the door behind her.
Thorn turned the crank until the Coordinator room was totally soundproof.
“A blank sheet of paper?”
Ophelia bit the inside of her cheek. There was no reproach in his voice, but that meant nothing. Whether his accent was Babelian or Northern, and whatever the circumstances, Thorn’s tone was so monotonous that it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.
“I’m so sorry. You asked me not to draw Lady Septima’s attention to us, and I’ve just done the exact opposite.”
Thorn didn’t respond. He remained standing and observed her at a distance. He was waiting for her expla
nation.
“The author of your manuscript,” Ophelia began. “He lived right here, in the Memorial, at the time when it was still a school. He . . . I’m certain that he knew the family spirits. I mean when they were children. And I have every reason to think,” she added, after a gulp, “that he knew God, too.” She watched for a change in Thorn’s demeanor. He didn’t bat an eyelid.
“What else did you learn?”
Ophelia certainly hadn’t expected him to swing her around in the air, but she would have appreciated a sign of approval, however small.
The floorboards creaked under her feet as she went over to the glass-fronted shelves, upon which there were rows of files and dials. She didn’t even glance at them. She saw only her hazy reflection, and far, far behind her, Thorn’s scarecrow silhouette.
“That I’m not really myself anymore. I don’t know when it started. Is it from having read Farouk’s Book? Is it from having absorbed some of your family power? Is it from having released that Other, the very first time I passed through a mirror? I sometimes feel as if I’m haunted by a second memory.”
Returning to an old habit, she gnawed at the seam of her gloves, and what she saw then, in the glass of the cabinets, didn’t please her. A small woman who, deep down, was afraid. Half a woman. “A bambina,” Mediana’s mocking voice whispered to her.
Ophelia turned away from her reflection and looked straight at Thorn. “I read the manuscript. Not just with my hands; with my eyes, too. For a brief moment, I understood what the caretaker had written. As though a part of me had suddenly remembered how to do it.”
She proceeded to tell Thorn all she had retained from her reading. The school of peace; the training sessions; the departure to the city; L.’s light; A.’s telescope; J.’s disappearances; and particularly, most particularly, the caretaker’s last words: “He ain’t like them blasted brats, that one. Must have a word with the head about it.”
The Memory of Babel Page 24