After a seemingly endless silence, the airship descended onto a small ark, which Ophelia recognized from having visited it twice. It was the district of the powerless, where Professor Wolf had formerly lived, and where Fearless-and-Almost-Blameless had died of terror. Ophelia had slept on one of these roofs, in an abandoned greenhouse, with Octavio. They had become friends that night.
She turned abruptly away, to stop the memory from taking hold.
She frowned on hearing muffled protests behind her, in the dark. With methodical efficiency, the family guard had lowered the gangway and made several passengers disembark. It had all happened extremely fast; the airship was already gaining altitude. Ophelia wiped away the mist her breath had left on the glass of the porthole. On the quayside the airship had stopped at, some men, women, and children looked completely distraught, in the middle of their trunks. The light from the streetlamps showed up the whiteness of their clothes. It was the powerless she had seen onboard. Lady Septima had uprooted them from the center of town to confine them to just one district—a minor ark that, according to her own admission, was more likely to collapse than inland districts. These people were born in Babel, had lived there for generations, but their mistake was not having any of Pollux’s blood in their veins.
The passengers who had remained on board stifled embarrassed coughs. Ophelia felt no better than them. Her protesting spirit had got stuck in her esophagus.
At the helm, Lady Septima’s wide-open eyes were incandescent. This was no longer the sign of her Visionary power, but of the volcano seething inside her. To her right, Thorn barely stood out from the surrounding darkness. He didn’t move, said nothing.
They flew over the district of the Memorial. Its titanic tower, clinging to its little patch of land, jutting out into the void, was all lit up. There was probably no one left inside at this time, but the bulbs weren’t designed to go out. They were illuminating the dome, allowing a glimpse, inside, of the terrestrial globe, floating in suspension.
And inside that, thought Ophelia, is Eulalia Gonde’s secret room, and the hanging mirror where she conversed with the Other.
It was there that the old world had ended and the new had begun, there that Eulalia had turned herself into God, there that the Other had ceased to be an innocent little echo. It was infuriating still not to know how.
The illumination of the Memorial was so strong that, despite the darkness, one could see the surrounding mimosa trees, the statue of the headless soldier outside the entrance, and the age difference between the oldest half of the building and the half rebuilt after the Rupture.
Ophelia turned to Elizabeth, whose breath she could see in the half-light. Under her puffy eyelids, dull eyes. Neither the disembarkation of the powerless—of whom she was one—nor the view of the Memorial—despite it owing its modernization to her—had stirred her. She had built her life around Helen, serving her interests and seeking her recognition, but that existence was over.
The airship finally flew over Babel’s town center, where the tide of clouds had reached unprecedented levels. Only the top stories of lofty buildings, the chimneys of the power exchanges, and the summit of a pyramid poked through. Lady Septima landed the airship without a hitch, despite the lack of visibility. The family guard disembarked to maneuver the airship on the ground and moor it firmly.
“Would you all leave calmly, please,” directed Lady Septima, finally addressing her passengers. “A tram awaits you outside. You will be taken to your temporary accommodation. There you will be parfaitement safe.”
“When will we be able to go back home?” one of them asked, timidly.
“You are at home, Son of Pollux. The whole of Babel is your home. What difference does it make that it be here, in the heart of the city, rather than on a little minor ark?”
No one replied. The gangway led into a fog so thick, the night was white. The civilians were swallowed up in it, one by one, with their suitcases. Once the evacuation was completed, the tram’s headlights moved off, into the distance.
At a military clicking of heels, Lady Septima swiveled round to Thorn.
“Remain onboard, sir. I will escort you myself to the Genealogists, but I have a final formality to complete here. You two, with me.”
This time she had addressed Elizabeth and Ophelia, who had to unstick her damp gown from the banquette.
“What are you going to do with them?”
Thorn’s question had a ring of warning about it, but the only reply he got was the clatter of Lady Septima’s heels down the gangway. Elizabeth followed her, obediently. Ophelia, on the other hand, instinctively recoiled, drawing the family guard, and their metal gauntlets, to her.
Thorn beat them to it by gripping her shoulder.
“I’ll take care of this.”
He plunged into the clouds with Ophelia. The family guard made a racket with their steel-tipped boots. They were in front, behind, everywhere. Where were they taking them to? The only clues were at ground level: cobbles, tracks, a gutter, and, here and there, trampled leaflets:
AND YOU, HOW ARE YOU GOING TO CELEBRATE THE END OF THE WORLD?
Ophelia couldn’t speak to Thorn, but she could feel his fingers gripping her. She peered into the fog, hoping the Shadow would burst forth to help them escape, once again. Instead, Lady Septima’s red eyes greeted them at the end of their march.
“I told you to wait onboard, sir.”
Thorn’s fingers tensed. Ophelia understood why when a night wind scattered the nearest clouds. They were standing on what remained of the spice market, where the first landslide had occurred. An airship, considerably bigger than the one they had just left, was moored on the edge of the void. A long-distance craft. An appalling number of hands were banging on the windows of its huge gondola.
On the ground, beside the landing stage, the guards on duty were all holding rifles with bayonets. Real rifles.
It was only at the sight of them that Elizabeth’s eyelids finally deigned to lift. For the first time, doubt seemed to have stirred her. Hesitantly, she opened her mouth to speak, but it was Thorn who said the forbidden word:
“Weapons. That’s illegal.”
“Preventive equipment for peace. You stayed shut away in that observatory for too long, Sir Henry. As I have already said, circumstances have changed. And the laws have, too. But the Index is very much still in force.”
Ophelia suddenly realized that she, personally, wasn’t remotely surprised. Deep down, the moment she had seen Lady Septima on that verandah, she had known that this was how it would end. Her son was dead, she needed scapegoats. And she needed to sacrifice them as fast as possible, in the middle of the night and the fog, just a few steps away from the tram that had driven the good citizens to their new abodes.
“How many people have you crammed into that airship?” asked Thorn.
“The required number,” replied Lady Septima. “And two more: Mademoiselle Eulalia, Mademoiselle Elizabeth, you dishonored the late Lady Helen, and you rendered yourselves unworthy of being her Goddaughters. I condemn you to banishment.”
“I did not dishonor her.”
If only with a pathetic muttering, Elizabeth had finally decided to react.
“Accuse me of any wrongdoings, but not that one,” she implored. “Not that one.”
“I leave you the choice, ex-virtuoso. You can go up this gangway either in an exemplary way or in a shameful way.”
Elizabeth was a good head taller than Lady Septima, and yet she suddenly seemed tiny in front of her. Her bruised lips quivered. She bowed her head as a sign of surrender, held her fist to her chest in a final regulation salute, and then went up to board the airship.
Thorn’s hand strengthened its hold on Ophelia. His harsh words succeeded in turning her to jelly:
“This airship wasn’t designed to transport so many passengers, not to mention the radio com
munication problems. These people will not reach their destination, and you know it.”
“What I know, Sir Henry, is that you are not an authentic Babelian.”
Lady Septima had made this statement without deigning to look up at him. She was examining the brace he needed to remain upright. Around them, the moths could be heard colliding with the lanterns of the family guard.
“You are an error that infiltrated our ranks. The Genealogists offered you a chance, which you have constantly wasted, but that,” Lady Septima admitted, reluctantly, “is not for me to judge. So go and fulfill your duty by giving them your report, and let me fulfill mine by entrusting Mademoiselle Eulalia’s fate to me. Maintenant.”
Ophelia gazed at the windows of the airship, pummeled by all those fists, and then the void—the unfathomable, the unimaginable void—that awaited them.
She could almost feel, through Thorn’s fingers, the blood coursing under his skin to lubricate the workings of his brain. Undoubtedly, she didn’t have his mastery of mathematics, but she could still tell that their adversaries were too numerous and too heavily armed. If Thorn used his claws right now, they would turn their rifles on him. Ophelia’s animism wasn’t up to stopping bullets.
“I’m going on,” she decided.
With a determined jerk of her shoulder, she freed herself from Thorn’s fingers. One of them, at least, had to get out of this situation safe and sound.
And since it wouldn’t be her, she might as well have as few regrets as possible:
“You have tainted Octavio’s memory.”
Ophelia had articulated each syllable while gazing at the fire burning in Lady Septima’s eyes. The Visionary could penetrate to the very marrow of her bones, but, for the first time, it was Ophelia who saw clearly through her, and her words had affected Lady Septima. The murderous rage consuming this woman was, first and foremost, directed against herself. She couldn’t forgive herself for losing her son and abandoning her daughter, but since she was blind to her own feelings, she looked elsewhere for a culprit.
“Go on up, petite fille.”
Ophelia made one step toward the airship; after the next step, she was sprawled on the cobbles. Her sandals had animated themselves without her knowing, tying their straps together to prevent her from leaving. She could act brave, but her animism wasn’t taken in by that. Lady Septima clicked her tongue, but much as Ophelia struggled, she couldn’t untie the knot, or take her sandals off. They were going to drag her onto the gangway, with the help of their bayonets.
“Return this to the Genealogists on my behalf.”
It was Thorn’s voice. His true voice, his Northern voice.
He had taken off his LUX insignia to hand it to Lady Septima. Then, with a grating of metal, he kneeled down beside Ophelia. The high-tension lines that electrified his face had all relaxed. There were no more conflicting currents, just a single certainty that shone from his eyes in the depths of the night.
“Together.”
Awkwardly, he lifted Ophelia up in his arms, and went up to board the long-distance craft.
WHIRLWIND
Victoria had always been fascinated by the spyhole at home. How often had she found Mommy with her eye pressed to it, even if no one had just knocked on the door? How often had she, too, wanted to look out, beyond the real walls and fake trees of the house?
Today, Victoria felt as if she was on the other side of the spyhole. All she could see of the world was miniature images and minuscule sounds. She had sunk so deep in the big bathtub, full of shadows, that she couldn’t move or feel anything. She wasn’t scared. In fact, she was barely conscious of her own existence; she was dissolving, like those aspirins Mommy dropped into her glass of water. And she increasingly wondered who exactly were that Mommy and that house her thoughts were forever returning to. At the same time, she also wondered who that Victoria was, thinking of that Mommy and that house.
A noise, blurred by the echoes, brought her attention back to the little spyhole on the world, on the very surface of the bathtub. Not really a noise, more a voice. Godfather’s voice. Who was Godfather?
Until then, Victoria had stayed between two waters—memory and forgetting, form and formlessness—but she knew that, if she used the strength she had left to go back up to the surface, the fall that would follow would drag her down to the very bottom of the bathtub, from which she would never return.
To see Godfather one last time. Before forgetting him altogether.
She focused entirely on the spyhole, on the voice escaping through it, on the colors that gained meaning as she widened her view. A man was mending the many rips in his shirt. He was badly shaved, badly combed, badly dressed, but there was an intensity to his every movement. He was singing to himself. The red thread he had picked for his sewing job stood out against the whiteness of the fabric, and when he had finished the mending and buttoned up his shirt, seeming very pleased with himself, it looked to Victoria as if his body were slashed with wounds. She seemed to remember that he was Godfather, but the less Victoria felt herself, the more her perception of him, no longer limited by her child’s eyes and words, deepened. Had she found him handsome before? How had she not seen how damaged he was, behind his smile? She loved him all the more for it. This man had been a part of her ever since he had leaned over her cradle and—something inside Victoria suddenly remembered better than her—since he had whispered to her: “No one’s worthy of you, but I’ll try all the same.”
“It’s torn yurt . . . your turn, ex-ambassador.”
Victoria’s view widened through the spyhole to include the woman sitting opposite Godfather. The Bespectacled-Little-Lady. They were both settled on an assortment of cushions and rugs, separated by a board game. The Bespectacled-Little-Lady was waiting, in no apparent hurry, poker-faced behind her long, dark hair, but the shadows were writhing frenetically under her body.
Godfather piled up three black checkers on the board and, with a swipe of his hand, took all the white checkers.
“You’re making up the rules, ex-ambassador.”
“I’m adapting to my opponent, ex-madame.”
Victoria saw them, but she also saw the emanations produced by their every movement, their every word, like so many rings in the water of the bathtub. Sometimes, a few returned as echoes.
Victoria widened her view even further. They were playing in a huge cabinet of curiosities, in which objects from the four corners of the arks were amassed: stuffed chimeras, weightless chairs, perfumed books, a vast map of the winds, clouds under cloches, electromagnetic cup-and-ball toys, an animated; she could give each of them an identity, deeper than words, as if she had always known each object intimately; as if, deep inside her, there was someone who knew much more, just waiting to be dissolved, too, in order to emerge. Her view of this place was now so complete, she could imagine it in its entirety, its smallest nooks and crannies, its connecting rooms; she could even sense, beyond its walls, the spatial distortion isolating this place from the rest of the universe.
“You never eat?”
Godfather was now calmly cutting around a can with a can-opener, but his light eyes questioned the Bespectacled-Little-Lady, on the other side of the checkerboard.
“I have not been subject to demonic perusal . . . organic disposal for centuries, ex-ambassador.”
“Which doesn’t stop you from being trapped here with us, ex-madame.”
Godfather screwed up his eyes, as if doing so helped him to fathom the Bespectacled-Little-Lady, behind her round face, pink lips, long eyelashes, and strange dress with two bare knees poking out.
“I’m really struggling to get used to your true appearance. You look like our little Mrs. Thorn, to a degree that’s disturbing.”
“It’s rather she who looks like me.”
The can-opener froze in Godfather’s fingers.
“How the devil did you en
d up stealing people’s faces? Was your pretty little one no longer enough for you?”
The Bespectacled-Little-Lady limply shrugged one shoulder.
“I see,” murmured Godfather, his smile returning. “You didn’t choose to do so, it just happened. You played with forces that turned against you. But why does your talent for duplication not work on the family spirits? They are your personal creation, after all.”
“Without their Books, the family spirits are nothing,” explained the Bespectacled-Little-Lady. “And I can’t take on the base of a fluke . . . face of a Book.”
Godfather opened the can with a final flourish.
“I’ve changed my mind. You and Mrs. Thorn have nothing in common.”
From a neighboring room, a torrent of expletives, gushing of water, and meowing in protest could be heard. Another woman, with hair half-dark, half-blonde, slammed the door behind her, unconcerned about the puddle of water she was spreading all around her. Anger oozed from her every pore. It was the Funny-Eyed-Lady, as Victoria vaguely recalled. The cat following her—“Twit,” as Victoria also recalled—shook itself furiously.
Brandishing the can of food, Godfather let out what was at once a sigh and a smile.
“Pity’s sake. Don’t tell me we haven’t got conveniences anymore, ex-mechanic. I can’t guarantee the final outcome of this meal.”
“I’m just looking for a way out, myself.”
“You won’t find one, either in the bathroom or anywhere else. You don’t need me to tell you—the little favorite of our much missed Hildegarde—what a non-place is. I haven’t managed to conjure up a single shortcut to the outside world, and even God in person,” he sniggered, indicating his opponent, “hasn’t managed to get out of here, despite her myriad powers! Let’s be patient, my dear.”
The Storm of Echoes Page 30
