The Memory of Babel

by Christelle Dabos

  “We are now going to proceed to the awarding of the other grades. Among all the apprentice virtuosos here present, alas, rare will be the chosen few. Tradition requires that just one Son of Pollux and one Godchild of Helen be promoted to aspiring virtuoso in each company, and, believe us, the choice was not always easy. Each file was examined with the utmost attention by the Lords of LUX, and, of course, by Lady Helen and Sir Pollux. Please come up to receive your grade when your name is called. Company of Scribes: Cornelia and Erasmus!”

  Two apprentices left their rows to make for the rostrum. Their radiant faces contrasted with the jealous expressions of their classmates, who forced themselves to applaud them, half-heartedly.

  As the Genealogists called up the apprentices, tension spread to Ophelia’s every muscle. Right. The decisive moment had finally arrived. In but a few moments, either she would become an aspiring virtuoso, and could continue to be seen beside Thorn in public, or she would return to being anonymous, and Babel’s every door would remain closed to her.

  She observed, one by one, the classmates whose lives she had shared these past months. Zen was so anxious that her uniform kept shrinking and then expanding around her oriental-doll’s body. As for the Seers, they were still staring glumly at their boots. Did they already know the results? Ophelia would never see them again, and she almost felt a twinge of sorrow on realizing that she wouldn’t miss a single one of them. Her only real thought was for Mediana, whom she had left on that bench, hunched in front of the stained-glass window at the Deviations Observatory. Despite all her faults, it was here, within their ranks, that the Seer should have been found today.

  “Company of Forerunners,” the Genealogists finally called out. “Octavio and Zen!”

  At this announcement, Ophelia did not bat an eyelid. And yet she felt as if her entire consciousness had suddenly retreated deep inside her. She saw herself, from afar, turning her head toward Zen as she stifled a cry of surprise. She saw herself, from afar, applauding her with the rest of the crowd. She saw herself, from afar, watching her as she went timidly up to the rostrum, with Octavio, to collect her stripe.

  Zen was a serious and competent woman. She had relentlessly honed her family power for months. Her ability to miniaturize and deminiaturize fragile documents, without ever damaging them, would certainly enable the Memorial to improve the storing and circulation of its information.

  She deserved to succeed.

  So why did Ophelia not accept defeat? Why did Lady Septima’s sly smile, from the rostrum, anger her this much? Because Zen wasn’t a true Forerunner. Because she didn’t have any real curiosity. Because she wasn’t driven by a thirst for truth; and especially, most especially, because she didn’t need that stripe like Ophelia needed it.

  “What do I know about it?” she promptly asked herself, shocked by her own thoughts. “We never really talked, she and I; I barely know her.”

  Just for a moment, Ophelia imagined herself, instead of Zen, on the rostrum, as if they were the reverse reflections of one and the same person. Then she stared at her boots, just like the Seers surrounding her. She was no longer just ashamed of having failed. She was also ashamed of having let herself be contaminated by that competitive spirit that had pushed them all mutually to hate one another. If the isolation chamber had helped her to grow up, it was certainly not to become that kind of adult. In one way, Ophelia was relieved that Thorn hadn’t been present to see her like this.

  She applauded Zen, sincerely this time. Never mind. There were infinite possible futures; it was up to her to choose another one for herself.

  “Congratulations to the new virtuosos!” exclaimed the Genealogists, once the last grade had been awarded. “As for all the rest of you, you may continue your lives without your prestigious uniform, but it will always be part of you, through your know-how and making known. Knowledge serves peace!”

  All throats in the audience combined to sing Babel’s anthem, all fists on chests. It was then time for the slow procession of failed apprentices, who now had to lay their insignias at Helen’s and Pollux’s feet. Ophelia was swept along in this parade. She went up the steps of the rostrum, like so many before her, and once she reached Helen’s vast crinoline, she kneeled to unfasten the silver wings from her heels. “Thank you,” Ophelia said to her.

  Of all the family spirits she had encountered until then, none had commanded her respect as much as this ogress of nightmarish proportions. She would have liked to garner a final look from her, and never mind it being filtered through a convoluted optical appliance, but Helen remained stony-faced when Ophelia’s wings clattered onto the pile of insignias.

  Lady Septima pretended not to notice her, either. However, the spark between her eyelids betrayed jubilation in its purest form. Ophelia didn’t thank her.

  Up on the dais, the Genealogist couple had completely lost interest in what was taking place on the rostrum. They had switched off the microphone and were exchanging sweet nothings with lips so close together, they appeared to be kissing. Their long tresses were as closely entwined as the fingers of their hands. This passion that radiated from their gold-painted bodies transfigured their aged faces. Ophelia couldn’t help but find them fascinating. Whether or not they were God’s equals, theirs was already an immortal heartbeat.

  “Apprentice Eulalia?”

  Ophelia turned to Octavio, who was waiting for her at the bottom of the steps. She had almost not heard him due to the fourteenth verse of the interminable family hymn of Babel.

  “Aspiring Virtuoso Octavio, I’m no longer an apprentice.”

  “Sorry. Just a habit.”

  He looked so uncomfortable that Ophelia rallied a little. She pointed at the new silver stripe on his sleeve, which he was rubbing like an annoying itch. “Congratulations. You deserve it.”

  “That’s what people keep repeating to me,” Octavio muttered, looking away. “When it’s you saying it, I’m almost tempted to believe you. Would you follow me, please?”

  Without giving her time to respond, he crossed the atrium, cleaving through the crowd of apprentices. Despite Ophelia elbowing her way through, she almost lost him. She would have preferred to remain as visible as possible for Thorn, but was he even looking for her? She had the feeling that, conversely, Octavio wanted to escape from the ultrapowerful sight of his mother, on the rostrum.

  Ophelia frowned on seeing him enter the northern transcendium. He ignored all the hands reaching out to compliment him, and took a key out of his pocket that she immediately recognized.

  The gangway to the Secretarium sprang out as soon as Octavio activated it from the post. “Let’s hurry up,” he said, through gritted teeth. “Sir Henry wants to see you alone. There’s such a crowd here today, I wouldn’t want any visitors to join us by accident.”

  Ophelia didn’t hear his last sentence. Her mind had remained lodged on “Sir Henry wants to see you alone.” She had to concentrate to catch what Octavio was now saying as he walked ahead of her along the gangway:

  “My mother wouldn’t hear of any of it. She won’t budge: what happened to Mademoiselle Silence, to Mediana, to Fearless, all nothing but a series of accidents. Professor Wolf’s testimony? Ramblings. She shows so little goodwill, I almost thought she was . . . it’s awful to say it . . . she was hiding things from me. But I think what’s worse is that she really believes in her own assurances. She’s so obsessed with the perfection of our city that, quite simply, she can’t conceive that the reality might be different. Just like with my sister,” Octavio concluded, all in one breath. “It’s for that reason that I decided to tell everything to Sir Henry. I think that he, at least, took me seriously. He gave me his own key so I could open the Secretarium to you after the ceremony. I think he wants to hear your version of events.”

  Ophelia opened the reinforced door of the terrestrial globe. So Thorn knew everything. Everything, except the most important thing.r />
  “Good luck to you,” she said to Octavio. “I’m sure you’ll put your wings to better use than you think you will.”

  After the stiffest hesitation, he shook the hand she offered him. “You, too, you deserved your stripe, Eulalia. I won’t bid you farewell. I have reason to think that we’ll end up seeing each other again.”

  He turned on his heels, with a sudden clattering of wings, and set off at a swift pace, which reverberated all along the gangway. In the palm of Ophelia’s hand there now lay the key to the Secretarium, and also a little piece of paper, folded into four.

  On the paper, there was a very badly written note:

  Come and see me sometime, your hands and you. Helen.

  THE WORDS

  Ophelia crossed the inner court of the Secretarium with the certainty that she was doing so for almost the last time. The celebrations outside took on a sonorous resonance in there, like a refrain from an old record player. She looked up at the globe of the old world, floating in the middle of the light shaft. It was an exact replica of the one she was in, and yet the secret it enclosed surpassed that of all the collections put together.

  A hanging mirror.

  A mirror caught between two different ages.

  A mirror that had witnessed a primordial event.

  Ophelia still couldn’t understand how she had managed to make such a transition, but she was grateful to that object for all that it had taught her. She took the closest transcendium. The fitful beating in her chest merged with the clicking of the database cylinders.

  “Sir Henry wants to see you alone.”

  She gave two little knocks on the door before entering the Coordinator Room. When she banged into a pyramid of cardboard boxes, she wondered whether she hadn’t made a mistake. A flickering half-light hovered in the room, and Ophelia understood why the moment a flash of light hit her in the glasses: a projector placed on a stool was transferring spectral images onto one of the walls, changing transparency every ten seconds with a mechanical clunk. They were all enlargements of printed texts.

  “Don’t stay in the light.”

  Thorn’s voice had come from the back of the room, among the towering piles of boxes, where the shadows loomed largest. His long, angular body, hunched over a microfilm viewer, twisted like twine, was at one with the stool he was perched on. The machine’s binocular lenses covered his eyes, which he raised just once every ten seconds, with uncanny punctuality, to take a quick look at the projection of a new transparency on the wall. Carefully, and very gradually, his fingers turned the rotating knobs that made the spool of film unwind through the lens of the viewer.

  “Take a box,” he added, without stopping.

  It wasn’t exactly affectionate, and yet Ophelia instantly felt her eyes, nose, and throat flooding uncontrollably. She suddenly realized how much Thorn had scared her by rejecting her, and how reassured she felt seeing him again. She smothered a sniffle as best she could with the sleeve of her uniform, and then opened a box at random, from among the dozens cluttering the room. It was full to the brim with spools of microfilm, each bearing a faded old label.

  “If you can make out a date, put the oldest to one side,” Thorn instructed.

  With surgical precision, he replaced the spool in the viewer with another one. Ophelia would have appreciated him taking a break from his work, but he seemed more time obsessed than ever. The light of the viewer made the silvery blond beard creeping over his face shimmer. Ophelia might have been on the other side of the room, but she could feel the raw energy radiating from him, like an electric field. How long had he been perched on this stool? Was he even aware that the awarding of grades had just taken place, right under his Secretarium?

  Thorn frowned when, as he glanced at a new transparency on the adjoining wall, he noticed that Ophelia hadn’t started her sorting. “I am aware of your altercation with Fearless-and-Almost-Blameless; of your edifying conversation with Professor Wolf; and of your research into E. G.’s books after they were destroyed by Mademoiselle Silence,” he reeled out in one breath. “You had an excellent lead there. If we had discussed it the other evening, rather than both getting agitated, we would have saved time. All the micro-documents you see here were created for the Interfamilial Exhibition of sixty years ago,” he explained, peering once again through his binocular lenses. “They have never been sorted since then. It would be reasonable to suppose that a copy of E. G.’s books might be found somewhere in these cardboard bo—”

  “I won’t be a virtuoso,” Ophelia interrupted him. At this moment, she couldn’t care less about E. G.’s books: nothing mattered more than the urgent need to have, right here and right now, a real conversation with Thorn.

  “I suspected as much.” He had responded to her without lifting his nose from his viewer, or slowing the winding of his spool. “I gave an unfavorable opinion on your promotion,” he continued, sounding businesslike. “I presume that must have had some influence.”

  “You did what?” Ophelia stammered. “But I thought you wanted . . . ”

  “I changed my mind. It recently struck me that the Genealogists were a little too interested in the future Forerunners. I shouldn’t have encouraged you to obtain that grade. Your cover wouldn’t have fooled them for long.”

  “In that case, you could have . . . ”

  “Spoken about it to you first?” Thorn completed her sentence for her. “You were not exactly reachable these last few days.”

  Ophelia went quiet. She felt such a jumble of emotions, it was hard for her to decide whether she was enormously relieved or dreadfully disappointed.

  She took a deep breath. “There is something else I must tell you. That I should have told you before, in fact.”

  “It can surely wait a bit longer,” he muttered, between his teeth. “At the rate of a transparency every ten seconds and a microfilm every four minutes, I will have found what I’m looking for between now and dawn.” As he said this, he changed the spool of his viewer and clamped his eyes back on the binocular lenses.

  Ophelia crossed the room, taking care not to knock over any boxes, which wasn’t the easiest task. Thorn was so absorbed in his microfilms that he didn’t notice her approaching him. She had no choice but to contemplate the huge curve of the back he insisted on turning away from her. She was now just an arm’s length away from him. The last time she had attempted to close this gap—this gulf—between them, Thorn had turned his claws on her.

  Timidly, she raised her hand toward the shoulder, its joint rolling under the shirt with every knob rotation. She wanted all of Thorn’s attention as she finally released the words so long trapped inside her: “I love you, too.”

  She jumped. Thorn had spun around, fast as lightning, to block her wrist. His reaction was so abrupt, the glint in his eyes so hard, Ophelia thought he was about to push her away once again. With a totally unpredictable opposite movement, he pulled her toward him. The stool tipped over. Ophelia felt as if she were landing with all her weight between Thorn’s ribs as they fell together, to a clattering of steel and an avalanche of boxes. The viewer exploded into fragments of glass on the floor beside them.

  It was the most spectacular and baffling fall Ophelia had ever experienced. Her ears were humming like hives. The frame of her glasses was digging into her skin. She could no longer see a thing, could barely breathe. When she realized that she was crushing Thorn, she wanted to extricate herself, but couldn’t. He was imprisoning her in his arms so tighly that she could no longer distinguish between the beating in their chests.

  Thorn’s bushy beard became buried in her hair as he said: “Above all, no sudden gestures.”

  After the way he had just flung them both to the ground, this warning was somewhat incongruous. The arm vise relaxed, muscle by muscle, around Ophelia. She had to lean on Thorn’s stomach to get back up. Half-slumped on the floor, his back against a bookcase, he was watc
hing her with extreme tension, as if expecting her to trigger a catastrophe.

  “Never do that again,” he said, stressing each syllable. “Take me by surprise. Never. Have you got that?”

  Ophelia had too much of a lump in her throat to reply to him. No, she hadn’t got it. She was starting to wonder whether he had even listened to her declaration.

  She was dismayed at the sight of bits of metal scattered on the carpet. There wasn’t much left of Thorn’s leg brace.

  “Nothing that can’t be repaired,” he commented. “I have some tools in my bedroom. This, on the other hand, is more problematic,” he added, glancing at the shattered pieces of the microfilm viewer. “I’ll have to get myself another one.”

  “I don’t think that is a priority,” Ophelia snapped.

  She bit her tongue when Thorn pressed his mouth against hers. At that moment, she no longer understood a thing. She felt his beard pricking her chin, his disinfectant smell going to her head, but the only thought that crossed her mind, a stupid, obvious one, was that she had a boot stuck in his shin. She wanted to pull away; Thorn stopped her. He cradled her face with his hands, his fingers in her hair, pressing against the nape of her neck with an urgency that knocked them both off balance. The bookcase showered them with papers. When Thorn finally pulled away, short of breath, it was to look sternly straight through her glasses.

  “I warn you. The words you said to me, I won’t let you go back on them.” His voice was harsh, but underlying the authority of his words there was some sort of crack. Ophelia could see the quickened pulse in the hands he was awkwardly pressing to her cheeks. She had to admit, her own heart was swinging to and fro. Thorn was, without doubt, the most disconcerting man she’d ever met, but he did make her feel wonderfully alive.

  “I love you,” she repeated, firmly. “That’s what I should have replied to you every time you wanted to know what I really wanted to say to you. Of course, I do want to unlock God’s mysteries and regain control of my life, but . . . you’re actually part of my life, actually. I called you an egoist, and at no time did I ever put myself in your shoes. Please forgive me.”