The Memory of Babel

by Christelle Dabos

  Having always thrown on the first garment that came to hand, Ophelia would now have to make a concerted effort if she wanted to melt into the background on Babel. “And what happens if one dresses other than the code allows?”

  “One has to pay a fine to the city. The greater the offense, the heavier the fine.”

  She knocked over the pile of the clothes that Ambrose had heaped into her arms. It was galling to note that, even without having hands the wrong way around, she was the clumsier of the two of them.

  “Stay here overnight,” suggested the whaxi driver, noticing the light fading through the casements. “We’ll start the search for your bag first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “And the Memorial? Wouldn’t it be possible to go there today?”

  Ambrose’s eyes widened, the whites standing out against the dark surface of his skin. “It would be closed by the time we got there. The place seems to mean a lot to you. What are you seeking, exactly?”

  “It’s personal.” Ophelia regretted her snappiness when she saw Ambrose’s smile disappear.

  “Forgive my indiscretion. Please follow me, mademoiselle, you must feel like freshening up and resting. Are you hungry? Would you care to share my table?”

  Ophelia picked up the clothes scattered on the floor, and then turned her glasses to the chair that was already moving toward the door with a mechanical purring sound. “Ambrose?”

  “Mademoiselle?”

  “Why are you helping me?”

  The chair’s wheels came to an abrupt halt, screeching on the checkered marble, but Ambrose didn’t turn around. From where she stood, Ophelia could see his inverted hands tightening on the armrests.

  “Because you’re not an automaton.”

  THE MEMORY

  Ophelia wasn’t sleeping. She was opening and closing Thorn’s watch without looking at it, just to hear the familiar clicking of the cover.

  Click click. Click click. Click click.

  Curled up, she had thrown off all the bedsheets, and was staring myopically at the splashes of light shining between the gap in the mosquito net, unable to determine where the stars began and the lamps ended. The breeze swept through the open window, wafting the fresh scent of eucalyptus around the room. The crickets’ chirring rippled the surface of night.

  Click click. Click click. Click click.

  Ophelia was shivering. The sun had burnt the skin of her face, and yet she was freezing cold. Tonight, the void deep inside her had taken on breathtaking proportions, as though it weren’t just Thorn who had disappeared from her life, but also a part of herself. She felt the night air on her nape, where, before, there had been her long, unruly hair, her lazy old scarf, and sometimes, on rare occasions, Aunt Rosaline’s rather rough caress.

  Click click. Click click. Click click.

  And what if Ophelia had got the wrong ark? If there was no connection between the Memorial’s decapitated statue and the headless soldier of her vision? If her only lead was a dead end?

  Click click. Click click. Click click.

  She still wasn’t sleeping when dawn made the sky blanch and the foliage hum, but the daylight restored her determination. “I’m going to get my scarf back, research at the Memorial, and find a small job,” she declared to the mirror in her room. She ran her fingers through her curls, which had doubled in volume overnight, forming a wild halo around her face. Babel’s sun had turned her cheeks crimson.

  Putting on her new clothes demanded great perseverance, despite the assistance of a mechanical servant. She had to fold and wind a long toga over her tunic in such a way as to pass a panel between the legs and leave one shoulder uncovered. A clasp, waistband, and belt held the whole thing in place, but Ophelia had the feeling that, with one false move, the whole arrangement would come apart, and the fabric fall around her feet.

  She felt more awkward than usual when she met up with Ambrose under the entrance portico. Relaxing against the back of his chair, he had closed his eyes as if to savor the morning air rising from the lily pools. The wind made the voile of his turban flutter. His golden profile, with its long lashes, was so refined, it made one forget the strange deformity of his body. He didn’t open his eyes immediately as Ophelia approached, but his lips turned into a smile.

  “I like hearing your footsteps in the house, Mademoiselle Eulalia.”

  That was all Ophelia needed to feel ashamed. Of having felt alone while close to someone far more alone than she was. Of asking him questions without ever answering his. Of having given him neither her real name nor her true story. Of having no intention to remedy this.

  Ambrose peered at Ophelia through the half-light of the portico, and nodded approvingly. “Congratulations, you’ve now become a true Babelian. I have a surprise for you. Jasper?”

  A mechanical butler stepped forward from the mannequins lined up before the front door. Ophelia rushed over to him as soon as she saw what was hanging from his articulated arm.

  “My bag? But how?”

  “Last night I sent a telegram to the Municipal Tram Company,” said Ambrose. “I reported the loss of your belongings. A courier came early this morning to drop them off here. I did tell you that honesty was a civic duty here. What is it?”

  Ophelia had suddenly frozen, clutching the wide-open bag, her glasses turning blue. “My scarf’s not there,” she muttered. “Was it also returned to you? It’s three-colored, quite long, a bit lily-livered.”

  Ambrose seemed disconcerted by Ophelia’s reaction; he had hoped she would burst with joy. “Eh bien, there was nothing else. Are your papers missing, too?”

  “No. They’re here.” Her throat was so tight, her voice was strangled. Someone must have opened the bag and the scarf had escaped. Or worse: it had been stolen.

  I must go looking for it, thought Ophelia. “Stick “missing” posters on all the walls, question people, scour every nook and cranny.

  No. She couldn’t do that. When she’d hidden the scarf, it was precisely not to attract attention. As harsh as this decision might be, she had to stick to the plan.

  “I’m so sorry,” stammered Ambrose. “You seem to attach importance to this object.”

  Ophelia avoided looking him in the face as she slipped on the strap of her knapsack. How could she have made him understand that the scarf was much more than an object? How could she have explained to him that she had given it life, and that she owed hers to it in return?

  “Thank you,” she said, in a choked voice. “You have been of considerable help to me. Right now, I must go to the Memorial.”

  After an awkward silence, Ambrose turned the crank on his chair. “I’ll drive you, mademoiselle. On you get.”

  The sun was rising over Babel, cutting through any lingering morning mist with its great blades, and casting the arcades’ shadows onto the cobbles. Ambrose’s chair moved from dark, little lanes to vast, light squares, avoiding the jungle of the gardens and the dust of the building sites. Perched on the rear running board, Ophelia looked gloomily at the crowd around them. Among all these togas, kaftans, tunics, shawls, harem trousers, belts, babouches, turbans, parasols, where was her scarf?

  None of the marvels Ambrose was showing her could shake her gloom; neither the great cascades of the Pyramid nor the monumental statues of Helen and Pollux nor the agora, with its imposing amphitheater nor the power exchanges in the city center, where the top engineers of all the arks gathered daily.

  Ophelia’s interest was solely directed at the sun-shaped LUX emblem, engraved in the marble of every building, stuck on the columns of every forum. She had even noticed it on the inside of her toga, embroidered in gold thread.

  “Who is . . . LUX?” she asked, out of breath. She was pushing Ambrose’s chair to help him up a seemingly endless incline. It was no easy task: she kept skidding on the needles that the umbrella pines, shaken by a searing wind, rained down on th
e cobbles.

  “A very ancient institution, mademoiselle. They are patrons who make their wealth available to all enterprises deemed of public service. True philanthropists!”

  Ophelia rubbed off, on a cobble, a blob of resin stuck to her sandal. Philanthropists whose signature was on every wall of the city, all the same. “I deduce that they’re pretty influential.”

  “One could say that, yes. They preside at the Mint, at the Familistery, and at the Court of Justice. The Lords of LUX are not merely at the service of the city, mademoiselle. They are the city. Sir Pollux and Lady Helen themselves take no important decision without consulting them. It is also they who instigated the Index I told you about. You know, the ban on mentioning anything to do with . . . eh bien . . . the war,” he whispered, very quietly.

  Ophelia didn’t need to know any more to understand that the Lords of LUX were to Babel what the Doyennes were to Anima: Guardians in the service of God. If their grip on the ark was as absolute as Ambrose’s explanations led one to believe, she’d have to be doubly vigilant to escape their notice.

  Deep in these thoughts, she jumped when she was hit in the face by a feather so large that it flicked loudly against the lenses of her glasses. The slope they had just ascended opened onto a huge terrace overhanging the void: beyond the wide, stone balustrade, the sky stretched out endlessly. The terrace extended into a railway bridge, on which a train awaited, with the clouds its sole destination. The last passengers were hurriedly piling into the carriages.

  “We’re right on time,” said Ambrose, with a smile for the platform clock. “Let’s hurry to get on.”

  Ophelia struggled to do as he said. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the gigantic, winged creatures perched on the roof of the train. A Totemist, identifiable by his night-dark skin and golden hair, was circulating among them to check their harnesses. “Are they Beasts?”

  Ambrose waited until he had managed to get his chair into the nearest carriage before answering Ophelia. “Chimeras, mademoiselle,” he said, inserting their two travel cards in the on-board machine. “They have the strength of the condor and the docility of the canary.”

  The stationmaster blew his whistle, and the scratching sound of the birds’ talons on the train’s roof reverberated across the metal. Since all the seats were occupied, Ophelia instinctively clung onto Ambrose’s chair. “But a train, isn’t that a bit heavy for birds?”

  “Of course it is,” Ambrose replied, to her extreme consternation. “They don’t carry it, they propel it. The birdtrains are made to be weightless. The worst thing that could happen to us, if these birds stopped flying, would be to remain suspended in the middle of the sky. It won’t happen,” he assured her, indicating a shaven-headed woman milling around the passengers’ seats. “There are always Cyclopeans on board to control the gravitational fields. Reassured, mademoiselle?”

  “Almost.”

  Ophelia leant against a window as the train glided through the air, emitting metallic grating sounds. She glimpsed the powerful beating of a wing up above, and the slow swirling of the clouds down below. The experience reminded her of the flying sleighs of Citaceleste, although this was even more impressive.

  Seeing that the birdtrain didn’t plunge into the void, she finally relaxed and looked around at the other passengers, who, with the indifference of regulars, paid more attention to their books than to the view. She found them all surprisingly young and serious, so focused that no one spoke to anyone.

  “Students,” whispered Ambrose. “This birdtrain will serve the five academies and the virtuosos’ conservatoire before reaching the Memorial. We thus have time ahead of us. Did you know that several attempts have been made to explore the void between the arks?” he asked her, straight off. “It seems that no living being can remain there for more than a few hours. The deeper one goes, the worse it is—even birds don’t risk it. There’s sufficient oxygen, but even so, it’s physically intolerable. My father tried it out for himself, with a spacesuit he invented. He wanted to take a photograph of the world’s core, you know, where there are those perpetual thunderstorms. He lasted six hours and thirty-nine minutes. He admitted to me that they were the most challenging six hours and thirty-nine minutes of his entire life. As if, down below, there was a force that hadn’t wanted him. Don’t you find that extraordinary, Mademoiselle Eulalia? Our whole planet seems to want to remind us that, before, all that emptiness was filled up. My father thinks it’s a shame because it would be much quicker for him to travel from one ark to the next by crossing the void in a straight line, without having to respect the curvature of the old world.”

  “Really?” Ophelia said, politely. In truth, she was far too preoccupied with seeing the headless soldier to listen. Ambrose contemplated the sky through the window with a childlike fascination, and his inverted hands gripped his chair with excitement.

  “Indeed, did you also know that the arks don’t respect the laws of gravity? All the celestial bodies each move in relation to the rest, depending on their forces of attraction. All, except for the arks. They keep to the same position among themselves and all turn together, at exactly the same rhythm, as if they still formed one and the same celestial body. It’s what scientists call ‘planetary memory.’”

  Ophelia wondered what those scientists would think if they discovered that the shattering of the world was due to an apocalyptic creature trapped in a mirror.

  Ambrose continued talking enough for two, only falling quiet once they had arrived at their destination. Ophelia shaded her glasses from the sun as she tipped her head back to take in the Memorial tower. Its size was so overwhelming, its glass dome so dazzling, it looked like a lighthouse destined to illuminate the world. The little ark that served as its perch was ludicrously out of proportion by comparison; it seemed totally mad to have rebuilt, above the void, the half of the tower that had previously collapsed. Hundreds of monkeys leapt between the creepers entwining the carved stones, and then disappeared into the surrounding clouds.

  Ophelia moved along the forecourt until swallowed up by the Memorial’s shadow. The decapitated statue was there. It stood exactly as depicted on the postcard, just in front of the great picture windows of the entrance.

  “Is that what you were looking for?” asked Ambrose.

  She didn’t reply immediately. Now that she was seeing the statue close up, it was blindingly obvious. It didn’t resemble the headless soldier of her vision. It didn’t resemble a soldier at all. It barely resembled a man. It was now but an undefined form, ravaged by erosion and shrouded in creepers. The wrought-iron tip of its boot stuck out from the greenery, shinier and lighter than the rest of its body.

  “It’s a public monument, isn’t it?”

  “It is, mademoiselle.”

  Ambrose had seemed disconcerted by Ophelia’s question, and he was even more so when she handed him her knapsack, and then took off her gloves. Once she’d checked that there was no one but them on the forecourt, she rubbed her palms together to remove any sweat. When she approached the statue, a feverish shiver coursed down her spine, as happened whenever she was about to go back in time. She breathed deeply, and with each inhalation, little by little she forgot herself. She forgot the apprehension, the heat, she even forgot the reason for her being here, and when empty of herself, she placed her hands on the statue’s boot.

  The Memorial’s shadow ebbed away like a tide, while the sun moved in reverse in the sky. Day gave way to night, today became yesterday, and time exploded beneath Ophelia’s fingers. They were no longer her fingers. They were hundreds, thousands of other fingers stroking the boot of the statue, day before day, year before year, century before century.

  For luck.

  For success.

  For healing.

  For a laugh.

  For growth.

  For survival.

  And suddenly, as Ophelia was dissolving into thi
s crowd of anonymous hands, she found her own hands again. Or rather, hands that were hers without being hers. And it was through eyes that were hers without being hers that she looked at the statue. In gleaming metal, the soldier proudly brandished his rifle beneath the flowering mimosas, his head blown off by the shell that had destroyed the porch of the school behind him.

  Once upon a tomorrow, before too long, there will be a world that will finally live in peace.

  “Mademoiselle?” Ambrose asked, concerned, moving his chair closer.

  Ophelia contemplated her hands, really hers this time, as they shook uncontrollably. It had happened again. She had penetrated God’s past as if it had been her own past. She raised her face to the Memorial tower, standing there instead of the school destroyed by war. The mimosas were still there, bordering the central path; Ophelia hadn’t recognized them because, quite simply, it wasn’t yet the flowering season.

  The headless soldier. The golden mimosas. The old school.

  “It’s here,” she murmured.

  Here that she would tread in God’s footsteps. Here that she would tread in Thorn’s footsteps.

  THE VIRTUOSOS

  Ophelia was used to being small. And yet, when she entered the Memorial, she felt tinier than ever before. Inside, the tower took the form of a monumental atrium, encircled by the floors in parallel rings. The sun came through the cupola’s countless windows, making the bindings of the books, glasses of the readers, and metal of the automatons gleam. The silence here was so intense that a page turned had the effect of a thunderbolt. Ophelia felt dizzy when she noticed that there was neither staircase nor lift; visitors accessed the various floors by taking large, vertical corridors. There were reading rooms available right up to, and on, the ceilings. Seeing all these people and all these archives upside down was an experience even crazier than traveling with the help of public restrooms.