Ophelia’s mind immediately starting working again. She had no idea what the procedure expected of her, but she wouldn’t allow Thorn to compromise his cover to defend her.
She returned the man’s slap.
“You gave me no instructions,” she explained in a steady voice. “It seemed the most logical reaction to me.”
The entire assembly scribbled away in a frenzy of fountain pens. The lizard man picked up the pince-nez that had fallen from his face. The moment he put them back in place, his dimple disappeared. Ophelia noticed, from the slight shift in his gaze, that he had just discovered something that extended beyond her. Something that was invisible to her.
The man halted his manipulation of her, made no comment, and returned to the ranks of the assembly.
It’s like Gail’s monocle, Ophelia realized, with a jolt of surprise. The pince-nez of each of these observers functioned according to the same principle. But what mysteries did they reveal to their eyes? What had they all discovered about Ophelia that she didn’t know herself?
Thorn sat back down in his seat with intentional slowness, and didn’t cross his arms again. He, too, had understood. Ophelia needed neither to see him nor hear him to know that they were sharing the same thought at the same time. We need those lenses.
The beetle woman came out from the assembled ranks and, with gestures of exaggerated politeness, invited Ophelia to follow her.
“The invert will now be taken to the containment zone, monsieur,” commented the monkey girl, leaning over Thorn’s chair. “It’s important that subjects of the alternative program are not put in contact with those of the standard program.”
“I will need to inspect that zone, too.”
Thorn’s voice resonated as far as Ophelia’s stomach.
“Bien sûr, monsieur! We will show you all that you wish to see, within the limits of medical secrecy.”
As she followed her guide across the hall, leaving the assembly behind her, Ophelia could feel the moist footprints her bare feet left on the marble at every step.
The limits of medical secrecy . . .
The woman made her leave through a different porch, opposite the other one, on which this time were carved the letters:
EXPLORATION
No sooner had Ophelia walked through than the double doors, painted red and several meters high, closed behind her. Here there were no children laughing or anxious parents. Ophelia had to go through three more doors, each separated from the next by a vast esplanade.
She thought of the stranger in the fog who, twice already, had contrived to cross her path. She doubted they would manage a third time here, and didn’t know whether that was a good or a bad thing. Would she see them again one day?
She arrived at the feet of the giant she had gazed at from the landing tower. He was even more overpowering seen from below. Without glasses, Ophelia thought he resembled a mountain. A railway tunnel had been cut through his base; it was the only means of accessing the part of the observatory on which the statue turned his back.
The migraine was getting worse by the second, as if it were inside her own skull that Ophelia was now walking. She had no idea what had been done to her, but she felt like locking herself in a bedroom, blacking out every window, and burying her head in a black pillow.
The beetle woman indicated to her to climb aboard a small wagon, fit for a fairground carousel, but didn’t join her. She grabbed hold of a lever. Just before lowering it, she deigned finally to crack a smile.
“If you really want to understand the other, first find your own.”
“What did you say?”
Ophelia’s question was swallowed up at the same time as she was by the darkness of the tunnel. She gazed at the circle of light shrinking behind her as the wagon sped along the track. In front of her, like an opposite image, the tunnel’s exit gradually went from the size of a spark to that of a sun. She kept her hands clenched so as not to touch anything, less out of duty than out of fear of being distracted by an involuntary reading. What that woman had just said to her, was it a philosophical concept, or was she actually talking about the Other? Ophelia would have liked to shut her migraine up, even for just a few seconds, to think about it. Those exercises had done her head in.
The sides of the tunnel started to react strangely to the daylight as it grew and grew and grew the closer the wagon got to it. They started sending out thousands of multicolored geometrical shapes. Ophelia understood, too late, that this tunnel had been designed like a giant kaleidoscope. An infinity of fractal combinations penetrated her eyes in a flash. The migraine turned into a howl. Ophelia closed her eyes to stop anything else from entering them.
The wagon slowed down, and then stopped. The migraine stopped with it.
Ophelia reopened her eyes. A building site spread out before her, as far as the eye could see and in the minutest detail, as if she were once again wearing glasses.
She was wearing a pair.
Except they weren’t her glasses.
They were Eulalia Gonde’s glasses.
THE ATTRACTION
“The mess grub’s disgusting, but you’ll get used to it. At least we don’t die of hunger, like in town. Have to know where to go, over there. You ever been to a real restaurant, Officer God?”
The sergeant gives Eulalia a look intended to be uncouth, without really being so. She instantly spots the mole, quivering slightly, at the corner of his eye. She is younger and slighter than him, but it’s clear to her that she intimidates him. She often has that effect on people—she already had it on her teachers.
She smiles at him, indulgently.
“Just a tingle sime . . . single time. And if you’ll allow me to correct you, my name is pronounced Gonde.”
The sergeant now walks in silence, as the rubble crunches under his military boots. Eulalia understands that he’s humiliated. She spoke to him like a child, not like a man, and even less like a soldier.
Gripping the handle of her small case, she looks around the building site they are both crossing. Clouds of sand scour her glasses. Army excavators are destroying what was once the forbidden city of the last emperor of Babel—soon to become a truly unique observatory.
Eulalia’s eyes linger on the recumbent carcasses of ancient trees. Yet more history uprooted forever. It doesn’t upset her. She has no attachment to the past; all that counts is the future that will rewrite itself upon these ruins. She can already imagine it, this new world. It throbs beneath her feet like the heart of a baby waiting to be born. It’s the reason she volunteered for the Project and devoted her adolescence to preparing for it.
It’s the reason she exists.
They enter a dilapidated stairwell. Step by step, the sounds of the building site fade and disappear. The descent seems endless. The sergeant keeps glancing at her, over his shoulder. His mole increasingly quivers.
“Only survivor of your whole family, eh? Condolences.”
“Everyone loses someone during a war.”
“But people who lose everyone, they’re thinner on the ground. Is that why they chose you?”
His lips twist on the word “that.” Eulalia intrigues and annoys him all at once. That, too, is something she’s used to. She wonders what exactly he knows about the Project. Probably no more than she does, maybe even less.
“In part, sergeant.”
Eulalia can’t quite see herself explaining the other part to him, the most essential part. They didn’t choose her. It was she who made sure she was chosen, out of hundreds of orphans. She always knew that she was called to save the world.
The army has found something, here, in this ancient city, that’s going to assist her with that. Something that has the power to put a stop to the war, to all wars. Despite military secrecy, the rumors circulated in town, and Eulalia knows they are well-founded. She has always thought that, if hum
anity is this aggressive and bellicose, it’s not so much out of hatred of others as of fear of one’s own frailty. If each person in the world were capable of performing miracles, they would stop fearing their neighbor.
Miracles, that’s what they all need.
“What’ve you got inside that? It’s within the rules, at least?”
This time, the sergeant is indicating the small case she’s holding. The mole, at the corner of his eye, flutters like an anxious little bird. Eulalia imagines—she imagines endlessly—the child he was, that he still is, and she suddenly feels overcome with affection. If the sergeant hadn’t been her superior, she would have tweaked his cheek, just as she was doing only yesterday to the new arrivals at the orphanage.
“My writetyper . . . I mean my typewriter. They gave me permission to take it with me.”
“For the reports?”
“For my stories. Stories without war.”
“Oh yeah. A cellar, that sure inspires peace.”
Eulalia stops on the bottom step of the stairs and contemplates the basement in which she knows she will be spending a lot of time. She has to admit, she’s disconcerted. She has been through intensive training on the army’s most sophisticated cryptanalysis machines.
All that’s here is a simple telephone.
And suddenly, it’s the fall in reverse. A dizzying, baffling sensation of falling upwards. The telephone seen from the ceiling, then the ascent of the stairs, then the flight above the building site, the imperial city, the continent, the entire Earth. A round planet, all in one piece, with no arks and no void.
The old world.
Ophelia sat up in bed, shaken and clammy, a scream stuck in her throat. This had happened upon waking ever since she had confronted that Memorial sweeper. And as always, she needed a moment to collect her thoughts.
She had, once again, been visited by the memory of Eulalia Gonde. It even went beyond that. She had embodied her from within, in her flesh, in her name, with a degree of precision and clarity she had never attained before.
Just as a “why?” was forming in her mind, Ophelia became aware that she didn’t recognize her bed. It was strangely tilted, and when she shifted position, it rocked from one leg to another. All around there were just cushions, of every shape and color. Even the pajamas she had on rang no bells.
She had no memory whatsoever of having gone to bed here—of having gone to bed, period.
Ophelia searched around for her glasses, before recalling that the observatory had confiscated them from her. As it had her gloves. And yet she hadn’t read either the sheets or the pillows in her sleep. A shiver coursed through her as she stroked all this silent silk. She really had to concentrate to get any distant impressions from it, and they were too vague to interpret. Touching objects without being flooded with visions hadn’t happened to her since gaining her family power. She raised her hands into a ray of light, slipping between the slats of a shutter. How pale they were, compared with her suntanned arms . . . It felt like wearing gloves of a new kind.
Ophelia cleared a path through all the cushions. No sooner had she stepped down from the bed than she knocked over a pile of books. Putting them back in place, she saw they were all blank, with no title or text. The rest of the room followed suit. Empty frames and handless clocks littered the walls. Light switches had no effect on bulbs, which continued to flicker infuriatingly from the ceiling. The radio set Ophelia dived on to hear the news didn’t even honor her with a crackle.
As for the door, it was locked.
Ophelia was reading almost nothing of all that she touched in this bedroom. Had the observatory dulled her family power within a single night? The thought was alarming.
“No problem.”
She would wrench this place’s secrets from it, with or without hands.
She couldn’t find a handle for the shutter at the window. She pressed her face to the slats to see outside, but the sun blinded her. Her hopes were further dashed when she came across some mirrors in the bathroom: they were all the distorting kind, making Ophelia’s reflection twisted and grotesque. To consider passing through a mirror, she needed a stable reflection.
This proliferation of uselessness was suffocating.
Ophelia banged on the faucets until they spluttered some water, and had a wash. Her dream—her recollection—continued to grip her from within. It was a feeling hard to define, halfway between joy and sorrow.
She looked her reflection in the eye, in the puddle at the bottom of the sink. There was no trace of the Other in that particular past, no allusion to some rebellious reflection, not even the merest thought, as if at this stage, it wasn’t yet part of the story.
Ophelia had to pull the chain several times to flush the toilet. At least she had confirmation that Eulalia Gonde had been to the Deviations Observatory, even if the place wasn’t called that yet, after leaving the military orphanage. This project for which she had volunteered, it must have been the Project Cornucopianism mentioned by the Genealogists, but Ophelia had seen no Horn of Plenty in her recollection, either.
Just a cellar and a telephone.
The sound of a key drew her myopic eyes back to the door, which opened theatrically onto the silhouette of a woman. She had the shape of a carboy, topped by a giant bun.
“Mommy?”
The word had just popped out. It was but a second later that Ophelia knew that was impossible. This woman wasn’t her mother. In fact, it wasn’t even really a woman. It was an automaton.
From under its apron, on which was embroidered the word “nanny,” an inhuman voice rang out:
“GOOD MORNING, CHÉRIE. DID WE HAVE LOVELY BYE-BYES . . . BYE-BYES?”
Ophelia had never seen an automaton like this one before. It had a realistic face, with wide-open eyes, a snub nose, and a mouth stretched into an excessive smile. But its body was like that of an articulated doll. It had been got up in a puffed dress and light-auburn wig, filling Ophelia with confusion. After the exhibit from the Anima museum, it certainly couldn’t be a coincidence anymore: the observatory knew who she was and where she came from. And it was using that to unnerve her.
“What time is it? What happened to me after the tunnel? I slept right through, since yesterday?”
The automaton unbuttoned Ophelia’s pajamas without asking her first or replying to her questions.
“I WILL BE YOUR NANNY THROUGHOUT . . . OUT YOUR STAY HERE, CHÉRIE. I WILL TAKE GREAT CARE OF YOU. LET’S DRESS YOU QUICKLY, WE HAVE A BIG DAY AHEAD!”
“I’ll dress myself.”
A nanny really was the last thing in the world she wanted on her back. Her annoyance increased as she put her clothes on. Only yesterday, she couldn’t brush against them without unintentionally going back in time; today, they were virtually unreadable to her.
While Ophelia was struggling into her sarouel trousers, the nanny-automaton brushed her hair so vigorously, it turned into a cloud of static. Not for a second did she try to find her some shoes. So it was barefoot that Ophelia proceeded along a vast corridor that proved even more cluttered with knickknacks than the bedroom, if that were possible: the vases, furniture, display china all had obvious manufacturing defects, rendering them unusable for anything but decoration.
All along the corridor, other doors opened on to other bedrooms, from which other sleepy individuals emerged. From what Ophelia’s eyes allowed her to see of them, they were men and women of all generations and complexions, each escorted by a nanny-automaton disguised in a different way. They wore the same clothes, leaving arms and calves bare, and the same dark tattoo on the shoulder.
Were they, then, all inverts? Some showed deformities, others didn’t. There were about fifteen of them, at most. Not one of them returned Ophelia’s “good morning.” In fact, no one spoke to anyone.
She followed the others down a staircase, its steps cluttered with cardboard box
es. This residence was like some giant junk room. To her great annoyance, her nanny-automaton never left her. Uncovering the secrets of Project Cornucopianism with such an escort promised to be tricky.
Once on the ground floor, Ophelia looked for the cellar with the telephone from her dream. Instead she found a refectory. Here, a lavish buffet was spread out, offering a profusion of cakes, spices, custards, pies, cookies, sweet and savory pancakes, sweetmeats, jams, and so much more.
It was excessive, indecently excessive for so few residents.
Ophelia felt her heart race like a spinning top. She saw the residence’s deluge of objects under a new light. That Horn of Plenty, which, until then, had been just an old, somewhat abstract legend, suddenly seemed very real to her. Was it to be found somewhere here, right under her nose, in the guise of a bowl or plate?
Of course not. The observatory had hidden it from view, but that didn’t stop Ophelia from feeling very close to what she had come looking for.
She took a hearty bite from a pastry. She almost spat it right out; it tasted revolting. The same thing happened with everything she helped herself to. There was a startling contrast between the appetizing appearance of the food and its appalling taste. Even the tea proved barely drinkable.
This buffet was in the image of the whole residence. Ophelia’s disappointment was equal to her excitement. Was that really all the Horn of Plenty was? An abundance of faulty goods? How could she and Thorn use that to counter Eulalia, the Other, and the landslides?
In the refectory, the inverts chewed away in silence, each in his or her corner. Ophelia couldn’t swallow a thing.
She frowned when a fat brioche rolled toward her, on the tablecloth. The gift came from a young man sitting on the other side of the table, close enough for her to see his slanting eyes and big rosy cheeks. His half-smile revealed the whitest teeth. He, too, had the Alternative Program stamp on his shoulder. His were the first eyes Ophelia’s had met. She wondered what his inversion consisted of, since he seemed so ordinary. Having said that, hers didn’t show, either, at first glance. Blaise had told her that there existed all kinds of inversions: those of the body, those of the mind, and those of the powers.
The Storm of Echoes Page 13
