The Memory of Babel

by Christelle Dabos

  Nothing.

  The only thing she found, when she decided that it was too hot to stay a second longer, was a closed door. On the other side of the porthole, the Seers were running off.

  Ophelia worked on the door handle, which was so hot that it burnt her fingers, despite her gloves. It was no good. They had triggered the security lock.

  “Evening forecast: heat wave alert.”

  They knew! The Seers had anticipated this moment from the start. And, as always, they had made themselves the actual enactors of their own prophesies. Much as Ophelia banged on the door and cried for their help, no one came. And she obviously couldn’t count on her Animism to release the lock.

  The heat from the furnace was unbearable. Ophelia looked for another way out, but she was well and truly trapped. Sweat was dripping off her chin. Her feet were burning in their boots. She pressed her face to the ventilation grille on the wall. She couldn’t escape that way—she’d barely have got an arm through it—but it was the least overheated place in the room. Time trickled away, and with it, all the fluid within her body.

  She just couldn’t believe it. Were the Seers aware that they were putting her in danger? Apart from them, only Blaise knew where she was, and his birdtrain had flown off a long time ago.

  Ophelia tugged at her collar. Panic, more, even, than the heat, was suffocating her. She wiped away the sweat that was stinging her eyes; a shadow appeared at the porthole on the door. A click. The handle turned by itself; air rushed into the room.

  Ophelia rushed out of it. She coughed until her lungs hurt. Her head was spinning so fast, she had to lean against a wall. She would have cried with relief, had there still been enough fluid in her body to do so.

  Who had opened the door for her? The Seers? Wherever Ophelia looked, there was no one but her in the censoring department.

  She stumbled to the nearest restroom. She had to stop herself from drinking water from the tap—it wasn’t fit to drink—but she wiped the skin of her face and neck with a soaked handkerchief. She was as red as if she had been sunburned.

  She must find Thorn, and fast. He must be urgently informed of the disappearance of the only book by E. G. not to have been destroyed by Mademoiselle Silence. He could be missing the very item that was central to his research.

  Ophelia had barely left the bathroom before she went straight back in and vomited the contents of her stomach. Leaning over the toilet and shivering violently, she seriously considered denouncing the Seers. She would have, without a moment’s hesitation, if doing so wouldn’t mean she’d have to explain what she herself was up to in the censoring department. She mustn’t attract the attention of either Lady Septima or any Lord of LUX as she pursued her investigations.

  Ophelia encountered not a soul in the galleries, apart from a few automatons cleaning the cabinet windows. The Memorial had closed its doors; the visitors and most of the staff had left. She headed for the reading cubicles to find Lady Septima. She could only hope that Lady Septima would agree to give her access to the Secretarium, despite her lateness.

  The Seers were sitting at their tables, quietly bent over their books, as if they’d never left them. They returned her furious glare with ironic half-smiles. There was, however, one among them who had the decency to hang his head, visibly uncomfortable. Ophelia wondered whether it wasn’t he who, feeling remorse, had opened the door for her.

  She frowned on noticing that Octavio’s cubicle, at the Sons of Pollux desk, was empty.

  “Tiens, tiens, tiens!” said Lady Septima, when she saw her. “Here’s our missing person. For nearly an hour now we’ve been looking for you, apprentice. Not one of your classmates could tell us where you had gone. What is your explanation?”

  “I didn’t feel well.” Which was no lie. Ophelia’s hoarse voice, ruddy cheeks, and sweat-soaked hair all backed her up.

  “Well, I never. And you didn’t think it might be a good idea to let us know? Sir Henry needed your hands for a new evaluation. You made everyone late.”

  Lady Septima had clicked her tongue as she spoke, but this disapproval was a mere façade. Her eyes glowed with satisfaction. She could serve back to her pupil the humiliation that she, as a teacher, had suffered the previous day. Ophelia was instantly sure that she was perfectly aware of what the Seers had just put her through. Perhaps she was even the instigator.

  “I’ll make up for it,” she promised. “Could you open the access to the Secretarium for me?”

  “There’s no point, apprentice. Sir Henry found someone to replace you.”

  The effect these words had on Ophelia was more brutal than the heat of the incinerator. So that was why Octavio’s cubicle was empty!

  “If you really want to make up for it, follow the example of your classmates,” Lady Septima recommended, indicating the Godchildren of Helen desk to her. “Maybe the extra hours of catalography you do will mitigate the bad impression created by what you didn’t do elsewhere? What a shame, just a few days away from the awarding of grades . . . ”

  Ophelia sat in her cubicle, but took up neither something to read nor something to write with. She merely glared at the globe of the Secretarium, with its red-gold earthly crust reflecting the lamps of the galleries that circled it, like planetary rings. Since the cubicles were on the ceiling, Ophelia was seeing it upside down, but she had a direct view of the reinforced door.

  Thorn had replaced her.

  “Is the signorina going to cry?” one of the Seers whispered through the latticed partition opposite. “Would the signorina like a hankie?”

  Ophelia shut him up with a single look. She was seething with anger.

  Thorn had replaced her because of them.

  She left her cubicle as soon as she saw the gangway to the door of the Secretarium being deployed. Lady Septima was seated at the telegram counter; if she discovered she’d deserted her post without her consent, it meant certain expulsion. “I request permission to go to the restroom.”

  “Again?” Lady Septima hadn’t even looked up from her notebook, in which she was busy writing notes.

  “I’m really not well. I would prefer not to vomit over Memorial equipment.” Ophelia didn’t have to fake it. She really did feel nauseous.

  “You have five minutes,” Lady Septima decreed, still writing away. “And it will be reported in your file. A virtuoso must be totalement in control of his or her body.”

  That was the least of Ophelia’s concerns. She went off toward the restrooms, and then changed direction as soon as she was out of view. She went along a series of corridors and arrived at the northern transcendium just as Octavio was about to bring the gangway back with a turn of the key in the post.

  “I must go to the Secretarium,” she told him, breathlessly. “Just for a minute, please.”

  Octavio frowned with his thick, black eyebrows. At that moment, his resemblance to his mother was more striking than ever. “Why?”

  Ophelia felt impatience taking over. “Because I must speak with Sir Henry. It’s confidential.”

  “You won’t find him at the Secretarium anymore. He’s just left it. He’s going into town, an airship awaits him.”

  Ophelia reflected that it was decidedly not her evening. Nothing was going to plan. She went down the transcendium as fast as she physically could. Thorn was just striding through the doors of the atrium; for someone disabled, his pace was impressive. The difference in temperature between the cool of the Memorial and the night outside made Ophelia feel as if she were entering hot water.

  She only managed to catch up with Thorn as he was passing in front of the headless soldier. An airship, in silhouette, was preparing its approach, its fuselage gleaming in the moonlight.

  “Wait . . . ”

  Thorn turned when he heard Ophelia. It was the first time she was seeing him in the official uniform of the Lords of LUX. Its gold decorations took on a
silvery sheen under the haloes of the streetlamps.

  “I’m in a hurry. The Genealogists have summoned me.”

  “I’ll be brief. Why have you done this to me?”

  “Do not forget whom you are addressing.”

  The warning couldn’t have been clearer. Right now, Thorn was Sir Henry, and, even if only mimosa surrounded them, they were in a public place. Ophelia didn’t care. She could no longer contain the seething emotions consuming her inside.

  “Why?” she insisted, her voice choked. “Are you punishing me?”

  “You weren’t available. Waiting for you would have slowed me down in my research.”

  Thorn had drawn himself up to his full height and was looking straight ahead. Out of reach. The detachment of his reasoning increased Ophelia’s rage tenfold.

  “Slowed you down? For your information, I was also doing research of my own. It might interest you to learn . . . ”

  “Of your own, that’s precisely the problem,” he interrupted her. “I advised you never to leave your division, and you were supposed to warn me if you discovered anything new. Nothing has changed, you still always make your decisions alone.”

  “I wanted to help you,” Ophelia hissed, through gritted teeth.

  Thorn looked up at the airship, now so close to the ark that its propellers were making all the surrounding mimosas quiver.

  “I don’t want any of your finer feelings. I need efficiency. If you don’t mind, I now have a flight to take.”

  Ophelia’s blood ignited in her every vein. “You’re an egoist.” She had wanted to anger Thorn, and she knew, by the way he had frozen on the spot, that she had succeeded. All the shadows of the night suddenly seemed to have been drawn to the center of his face. He threw Ophelia a look so hard, she reeled from its impact.

  “I am demanding, a killjoy, obsessive, antisocial, and crippled,” he intoned, in a forbidding voice. “You can put all the defects in the world on me, but I will not permit you to call me an egoist. If you prefer to do things your way, go ahead,” he concluded, slicing the air with his hand, “but don’t waste my time anymore.” Thorn turned his back on her to join his airship. “Our collaboration is over.”

  Ophelia knew that one move from her would just make things worse for her. And yet she couldn’t stop her hand from shooting out to grab hold of Thorn, force him to turn around, stop him from going any further.

  She never reached him. A violent pain shot through her arm like an electric shock. Winded, Ophelia only just held onto the statue of the soldier to stop herself from falling. She stared wide-eyed behind her crooked glasses, as Thorn disappeared into the night with a sinister grating of steel, and without a backward glance.

  He had used his claws against her.

  SHADOWS

  The pencil flew across the blank sheet of paper. It drew large, dark swirls, darted to the other end of the page, sometimes tearing it with its lead, and then swirled again. Victoria stopped her pencil to look at the result through her long, pale hair.

  There was more and more black, and less and less white in her drawings.

  “You wouldn’t like to use your colored pencils, darling?”

  Victoria looked up. Mommy had lifted the lace tablecloth to watch her drawing under the sitting-room table. With a smile, she handed her all the pencils she had avoided using for weeks.

  Victoria selected a new sheet of blank paper. She placed it flat on the floor and began to cover it, like all the others, with big, black swirls.

  Mommy didn’t tell her off. Mommy never told her off. She merely placed the other pencils beside Victoria, on the floor. Then she brushed her cheek with a gentle hand to gather her hair over her shoulder, and put the lace tablecloth back in place.

  All Victoria could see now of Mommy was her green satin boots. She would have liked to put the green of Mommy’s boots into her drawings. She would have liked to put the blue of her eyes, the pink of her skin, and the blondness of her hair into them, too.

  She couldn’t. The shadows of the Golden Lady were stronger than all of Mommy’s colors.

  Since Victoria had seen what she had seen, and even if she didn’t understand what exactly she had seen, nothing was the same anymore. She slept only to wake with a start. She had lost her appetite. She had fevers that kept her stuck in bed for days, and when she was better, she preferred to play under the furniture rather than on the cushions.

  She no longer journeyed.

  As soon as she started to feel safe, The Golden Lady returned to the house. Mommy opened her door to her, offered her tea, spoke and laughed with her. The Golden Lady never stayed very long and was no longer interested in Victoria, but each of her visits was enough to add new shadows into the drawings.

  Mommy’s boots rang out on the parquet floor, on the other side of the tablecloth. They set off, came back toward the table, hesitated a moment, and then set off again.

  “Heels alive, calm down!” said Great-Godmother’s exasperated voice, at the other end of the sitting room.

  Mommy’s boots stopped in front of the fireplace, where a log fire was humming away. “I’m a bad mother.”

  Victoria had barely heard Mommy’s murmur above the crackle of the flames. The black lead of her pencil was devouring the paper, inch by inch.

  “You’re an overanxious mother, that’s all.”

  “Precisely, Madame Rosaline. Everything scares me, all of the time. Steps on stairs, corners of tables, embroidery needles, too tight collars, every mouthful of food: wherever I look, I see danger. If anything at all happened to her . . . I’m so afraid of losing her, too.”

  Mommy’s faint voice caught in her throat. Victoria looked up from her drawing for a moment to watch the patent shoes of Great-Godmother crossing the floor to join the green satin boots.

  “She’s fine, Berenilde.”

  “No, she’s not fine. She never smiles anymore, she barely eats, she’s tormented by terrible dreams. It’s because of me, you understand? I know what they say up there, at the court. They speak of her as retarded.” Mommy’s voice had become even fainter. “The truth is that, on the contrary, she’s highly sensitive. She feels what I feel, and me, I just keep contaminating her with my anxieties. I’m a bad mother, Madame Rosaline.”

  “Look at me.”

  There was a long silence in the sitting room, and then Mommy’s boots turned, one after the other, toward Great-Godmother’s shoes.

  “You’ve given up all the mischief of your old life to devote yourself to your daughter. You are a good mother, but you can’t create a family all on your own. He has his role to play, too.”

  “I always thought that, somewhere, deep inside him, he . . . Well, I hoped that for his daughter . . . ”

  “He will come. He will come because you have asked him to, and because his place, today, is here with you, not with all those ministers. And if he doesn’t come, well, it’s me, personally, who will go and fetch him!”

  Victoria squeezed the pencil in her fist tighter. He will come? Were they talking about Godfather? If there was truly one person in the world who could make all the shadows fly away, it was him!

  The bell of the house sang out, in unison with Victoria’s heart.

  “Ah, you see?” Great-Godmother said.

  From under the lace tablecloth, Victoria saw both pairs of footwear hastily leaving the sitting room. A few moments later, snatches of conversation reached her from the music room:

  “Our Lord has an extremely busy schedule . . . holding a plenary meeting on the forty-seventh floor . . . which is, may I remind you, still waiting to be ratified . . . ”

  This voice, drowning out Mommy’s soft one, it wasn’t Godfather’s.

  Victoria was tempted, for just a tick-tock from the sitting-room clock, to journey, so as to see for herself what was going on. She did not do it. Journeying meant seeing thing
s that mustn’t be seen.

  The conversations in the music room suddenly stopped. Victoria pricked up her ears, her black pencil frozen in the middle of her drawing. The strip of parquet she was sitting on suddenly rocked, like a wave of water. There was a loud creaking of wood, soon followed by a second one. Someone was walking in the room.

  Victoria knew who it was even before seeing, beyond the lace tablecloth, the two big, white boots that were moving slowly, very slowly, across the sitting room.

  It was Father.

  Victoria hoped, as hard as she could, that he wouldn’t notice her presence under the table, but then Mommy pulled her out of her hiding place. She sat her in an armchair close to the door, combed her hair, smoothed her dress, gave her a final, fond smile, and then went back into the corridor, where a man was repeating: “Our Lord has an extremely busy schedule.” Had Victoria been able to speak, she would have screamed to them not to leave her alone with Father.

  He moved slowly, very slowly to the other end of the sitting room, as far away as possible from Victoria’s armchair. He was so tall, he knocked into the crystal chandelier, but there was nothing funny about it. He went over to a window, and its weak light made his profile expressionless, and his over-the-shoulder plait and fur coat even whiter than they already were.

  Father looked like the lovely statues in the garden that he was now looking at. He had the same blank eyes. Eyes that, to Victoria, seemed to be absent.

  “How old are you, now?”

  Once, Victoria had brought both hands down on the lowest keys of the harpsichord in the house. Father’s mouth produced an even deeper sound.