The Storm of Echoes

by Christelle Dabos

  Thorn would have advised her not to touch the gift of a stranger, but what food could really be trusted here? She bit into the brioche and found it edible.

  “Thank you.”

  Discreetly, the young man pressed a finger to his lips to encourage her to be silent, and then pointed at their nanny-automatons, miming, by rotating his index finger, the turning of a gramophone record. Right. The automatons were fitted with a recording device. If Ophelia couldn’t ask a question without the risk of being recorded, investigating was going to prove quite a challenge.

  A gong rang out.

  “IT’S TIME, CHÉRIS!” announced all the nanny-automatons, in unison.

  Everyone went through a door and into a cloister. There, too, boxes bursting with knickknacks got in the way. The sand-colored columns, eroded over the centuries, clearly dated back to the time of the imperial city. Ophelia brushed her fingers over them without managing to penetrate their history. Without glasses, it was hard for her see the vast courtyard stretching beyond the jagged shade of the arcades. It didn’t look like a garden, more like some industrial structures. So that’s where the containment zone was situated.

  A morose silence prevailed among the inverts. The nanny-automatons ensured that they each kept their distance from the rest. Their line passed a procession of individuals in monks’ habits, concealed under gray hoods. They, apparently, were neither automatons nor inverts. One of them turned discreetly as Ophelia went by but said nothing to her and kept walking.

  After a succession of galleries and boxes, the inverts were finally led to the large inner courtyard, already baking from the sun. The industrial structures at last became clearer to Ophelia’s eyes: rusty carousels, empty fairground stands, a stalled big wheel, and, wherever possible, heaps of scrap. An old amusement park? Was that what the Alternative Program consisted of?

  Ophelia had the unpleasant sensation of moving away from what she had glimpsed in a dream.

  She was taken into an oppressively dark big top. Several rickety chairs faced a screen onto which, through a beam twinkling with dust, a projector cast jerky images. In the middle of the big top, a record player was blaring dissonant music.

  Each invert sat at a distance from his or her neighbors. Ophelia was put in the front row. The young man of the brioche sat two chairs away from her.

  The nanny-automatons had posted themselves at the entrance to the big top, waiting for the end of the screening. Ophelia hoped the show wouldn’t last long. On the screen in front of her, geometrical shapes kept endlessly forming and distorting, giving her both a splitting headache and nausea.

  “Don’t stare at them too much.”

  The whisper had come from the young man of the brioche. He sat nonchalantly in his place, arms and legs crossed, head raised at the screen, but his slanted eyes were turned toward Ophelia. They glinted with curiosity in the darkness of the big top.

  “Don’t stare at me too much, either. Do what I do. Pretend.”

  Ophelia gazed at the screen without really looking at it. Here, in the cacophony from the record player, away from the nanny-automatons, they could at last talk.

  “I’m Cosmos.”

  Ophelia liked the sound of his voice, his slightly oriental accent, his hint of derision. Listening to him, she felt very small once again. It was how Eulalia Gonde had felt in front of that sergeant and his quivering mole. But what was it?

  “Have you been on the program for long, Cosmos?”

  “Long enough to advise you not to stare at these images. Every day, they start with the screening. It conditions us, like the larval towel . . . I mean, like the arrival tunnel. Apparently, you fainted? You’re not the first to pass out. I myself threw up.”

  Ophelia clenched her toes on the carpet. She looked around for a reflective surface, in vain.

  “And then?” she asked. “What do they have in store for us?”

  “Exams. Interviews. Workshops. You’ll soon understand. Or rather, no, you’ll understand nothing. They’re all a bit loony here. You, you seem like a sensible person. You’re like me.”

  There was a cough behind them. Over her shoulder, beyond the rows of chairs and the projector, Ophelia could make out some figures in gray habits standing at the back of the big top.

  “Don’t look at them,” Cosmos whispered, a little more quietly. “They’re collaborators. Recruited by the observatory to dusty us . . . to study us.”

  Ophelia took a long, deep breath. One slip of the tongue could be a coincidence; two prompted caution. If she’d had a pocket mirror, she could have checked that this boy really was who he claimed to be. This thought had barely crossed her mind when Cosmos changed place, to sit a chair further away.

  “You suddenly mistrusted me. Why?”

  His voice, which Ophelia found harder to hear due to the distance and the music, had lost any trace of humor. This young man was an Empathetic. At least, he seemed to be. His family power allowed him to feel, to a degree, whatever Ophelia felt.

  She decided to speak frankly to him:

  “You express yourself like someone I know. And it’s not a friend.”

  Cosmos couldn’t resist an astonished glance at Ophelia, prompting another disapproving cough from the wings.

  “My electrocution poem . . . elocution problem? I’ve had it since I’ve been here. They heal nothing in this place. They unhinge us even more. It shows up in either speech or movement. It’ll get you sooner or later, too.”

  Ophelia’s toes unclenched on the carpet. Were Eulalia Gonde’s slips of the tongue due to what she had been through for Project Cornucopianism? Was that why she herself was experiencing object-reading problems? Had a single journey through that strange tunnel sufficed to make her hands illiterate?

  Cosmos lowered his voice even more, making it almost inaudible:

  “Unless one escapes first. Alone, it’s impossible. If one teams up, one chairs a dance . . . one has a chance.”

  “I volunteered to come here. I have no intention of escaping.”

  “If we don’t escape, mademoiselle, they’ll make us disappear.”

  “Disappear how?”

  “There are three protocols. Now, we’re right in the first. Don’t know where those transferred to the second go; they’re seen sometimes from afar. But as soon as they’re fan stirred . . . I mean, as soon as they’re transferred to the third protocol, they’re never heard of again.”

  Ophelia clung to what Blaise had told her in the heliwagon.

  “Maybe they were simply sent home?”

  “We’re not all lucky enough to have a home,” replied Cosmos. “In my case, no one is waiting for me outside. And you,” he added, somewhat mischievously, “I bet you’re here because you’ve got nowhere else to go.”

  A distant gong rang out again, bringing an end to the screening, and to their conversation.

  “The Deviations Observatory has its own necropolis,” Cosmos whispered to her as he stood up. “Don’t know about you, but personally, I don’t fancy ending up there.”

  With these words, he rejoined his nanny-automaton. Ophelia was led by hers to an individual tent, more modest in size than the big top, where some collaborators made her go through all manner of absurd motions: bend the elbow, close one eye, hop forward, swivel the head, and so on, to the point of dizziness. At no time did any of them show their face or say a word to her. Were they wearing dark-lensed pince-nez under their hoods?

  They then made her sit down in the darkness of a photographic booth. Ophelia was so dazzled by the flashes that she let her nanny-automaton guide her by the shoulder to the next stage of the protocol. This took place on the platform of a steam-powered carousel, unlike any she had seen before. Instead of seats there stood easels, like those normally found in artists’ studios. Each invert was standing. As soon as Ophelia was installed in front of her easel, the carousel bega
n to turn.

  “YOUR LEFT!”

  Some started to do calligraphy, others to draw, all using their left hand.

  “YOUR RIGHT!”

  As one, all the inverts swapped hands. The carousel switched direction to a ghastly chorus of creaks. One woman’s breakfast came up.

  Cosmos was right. They were all a bit loony here.

  Ophelia peered at her blank page, not knowing what to do with it. In fact, all she could think of was their conversation under the big top, forced to admit that it had troubled her. She wasn’t afraid for herself, not yet anyway. She was afraid for Thorn. The Genealogists were the most powerful Lords of Babel, and yet they hadn’t managed to protect their previous informer. Had he taken part in the third protocol? Ophelia knew that the best way to help Thorn was to be his eyes and ears wherever the observatory wouldn’t let him inspect, but she would have liked to put him on his guard.

  She jumped when the nanny-automaton spanked her.

  “YOU WON’T GET OFF THIS CAROUSEL AS LONG AS . . . LONG AS YOU HAVEN’T DONE YOUR EXERCISE LIKE A GOOD GIRL, CHÉRIE.”

  Ophelia observed her nearest neighbors. An old man kept halting his calligraphy to hit one of his ears while muttering “must go up down below . . . must go up down below.” Despite her myopia, Ophelia could see the shadows under his eyes, which were as black as the ink he was spattering over his face.

  She felt sorry for him.

  When she turned to the other side, she felt even sorrier upon seeing the profile of a young girl, who was busily coloring. Her cheek bore the pimples of early puberty. Ophelia hadn’t noticed her at the residence. Curiously, of all the inverts on this carousel, she alone had no nanny-automaton. She was, on the other hand, being closely studied by a team of collaborators.

  “YOUR EXERCISE, CHÉRIE,” repeated the nanny-automaton.

  Ophelia grabbed a bent pencil, as unreadable as all she’d touched since waking, and wrote the same sentence several times: “But this well was no more real than a rabbit of Odin.” She still didn’t have the slightest idea what these words meant, this way she would save herself from the humiliation of a public spanking on a steam-powered carousel. The rotating, first one way, then the other, turned her words into scribbles.

  She couldn’t stop herself from snatching furtive glances at the profile of the young girl beside her. The more attention Ophelia paid to her, the more that strange impression left by her dream resurfaced. It was bittersweet, it appealed to her and hurt her at the same time. What was it all about, in the end?

  The carousel stopped when the gong rang out in the distance. The young girl made a beeline for Ophelia with a big smile, her drawing clutched to her stomach. Now that she was facing her, hair tucked behind ears, her face revealed all its peculiarity. It was completely dissymmetrical. Ears, eyebrows, nostrils, teeth, even the contours of her forehead and jaw: nothing matched up, as if half of two different people had been combined. One of her eyes didn’t even have an iris, and its disturbing whiteness was directed at Ophelia.

  A gold chain linked the arch of her eyebrow to her nostril.

  “Second,” murmured Ophelia.

  Octavio’s sister. Lady Septima’s daughter. Neither half of this face resembled them. Without the chain, it would have been impossible to tell that the three of them were related.

  “The pecked assails the hay.”

  “Sorry?”

  Ophelia couldn’t understand. Second frowned with her different eyebrows and became insistent.

  “Gravitate by the iron and hang the mountains.”

  Ophelia shook her head, increasingly confused. This gibberish was worse than those slips of the tongue. Second sighed. She handed her drawing to Ophelia and jumped off the carousel.

  It was a strange but remarkable picture, skillfully drawn, down to the smallest detail, as if the jolting of the carousel hadn’t affected her pencil stroke at all. It depicted a boy who looked a lot like Octavio: he was crying, surrounded, at his feet, by papers torn to shreds.

  All the nearby collaborators immediately surrounded Ophelia to confiscate the drawing and pass it around among themselves, taking notes all the while. She paid no attention to them. She had just understood the nature of that feeling of pressure on her stomach she’d had since waking. It was what Eulalia Gonde had felt toward the sergeant, toward the orphans, and that she would feel much later toward the family spirits. A visceral emotion that had permeated every fiber of Ophelia’s being.

  The maternal instinct.

  COMMUNION

  The clouds unraveled like wool across the sky. Victoria felt as if she were made of the same stuff. She couldn’t feel the wind making the grass shiver or smell the orange trees’ aroma. She weighed nothing, had no form anymore. She was sinking into the bathtub. She was missing the Other-Victoria’s weight, which had so often exasperated her. Of course, her child’s mind couldn’t string together such tricky words to express all these thoughts.

  “Do you find this world peaceful, little girl?”

  Victoria turned her attention to the Fake-Ginger-Fellow. He was sitting right beside her, but the sound of his voice was as distant as that of the river, on the bank of which they had stopped.

  “Peace has a price. If your right hand causes you to fall, cut it off and throw it far away from you. That’s what I did, you know? When we change ourselves, little girl, we change the entire universe. Because what is outside is like what sins aside . . . what is inside.”

  He picked out a stone in the grass, threw it awkwardly, and then showed Victoria the rings spreading in the water.

  “That’s what you are.”

  The Fake-Ginger-Fellow’s eyes searched for Victoria under the orange trees, without managing to focus at length on her. She needed him. Or, more exactly, although she couldn’t have put it in such terms, she needed to feel she existed thanks to him. As long as he was conscious of her presence, she would be able to keep herself afloat in the bathtub. The giant whirlpool of last time had terrified her; what would she do if it tried once more to sweep her away?

  “You are doubtless too young to understand what I’m going to say to you, but I must say it to you precisely because you are too young. The use you make of your power is range as dose . . . dangerous. Every rupture worsens that of the world.”

  With his big, muscular hand, the Fake-Ginger-Fellow stroked the swarm of shadows that were mingling with those of the orange trees surrounding him. Victoria had learned not to be afraid of them anymore, but she didn’t get too close to them, all the same.

  “I also have another me. I’ve given him my joys, my sorrows, my experiences, my desires, my fears, all those contradictions that were impeding me. The more I gave him, the more the Other in turn gave me. And the more he asked for, too. He always asked for more. I had no choice but to give him up, in the interest of the world.”

  The Fake-Ginger-Fellow’s eyes alighted on Victoria, as if just finding her, finally, among the butterflies. Eyes full of emptiness. A part of her vaguely sensed that he needed her a little, too.

  “Your second you, who remained back there, in the Pole, with your parents, she gave you up, too. You’re the one who dimpled her . . . who impeded her. You probably don’t understand what I’m trying to explain to you, little girl, but it’s important. She’s not the other. You are.”

  No, Victoria didn’t understand a thing. And yet she started to feel a sadness she couldn’t express with either cries or tears.

  “I have nothing against you and can do nothing for you,” the Fake-Ginger-Fellow then said to her as, stiffly, he got to his feet. “As long as you’re happy to remain a shadow among shadows, you’re a problem only to yourself. The real danger begins when a reflection leaves its mirror. And, while remaining hidden, takes down what has taken centuries to build.”

  With ludicrous contortions, the Fake-Ginger-Fellow got rid of the bits of twi
g stuck to his clothes. The river water reflected the entire landscape apart from him—him and Victoria.

  “This body, that of a powerless person, has its limitations, but be patient . . . Of all my children, Janus has always been the most unpredictable and the least cooperative. If he finds me at his place before I have found his Needlers, we’ll have to start from scratch again. And I no longer have time to do that. We mustn’t rush things, little girl. At some moment there’ll be loophole. There’s hopefully a swallow . . . always a loophole.”

  On a sign from him, Victoria followed the Fake-Ginger-Fellow through the orange trees. He moved strangely when they were alone, as if it was more natural for him to twist his legs. He forced himself to walk normally as soon as he pushed open the gate to the usual public garden. It was really torture for Victoria to see all these roundabouts and rocking horses and not be able to play on them. There were never any children here. Once, Victoria had glimpsed a few laughing in the distance, but as soon as the Fake-Ginger-Fellow had arrived at the gate, the children had disappeared.

  The Funny-Eyed-Lady was sitting on one of the swings and digging deep furrows in the sand by dragging her shoes. The slanted light of the setting sun made her dark hair appear almost blond. She was gripping the chains while watching Twit, meowing and weaving endlessly between her calves. The cat darted away as soon as the Fake-Ginger-Fellow came and sat down on the neighboring swing. Twit didn’t like them much, him and Victoria.

  As for the Funny-Eyed-Lady, she barely raised her head.

  “Anything doing on your side?”

  “Nothing.”

  Victoria had noticed that the Fake-Ginger-Fellow spoke very little once they were no longer alone. She also noticed that the Funny-Eyed-Lady’s lips were all scratched from being bitten so much.