The Memory of Babel

by Christelle Dabos

  In a heartbeat, Ophelia felt herself vibrating in unison with the thousands of ancient objects surrounding her, and then reality hit her: Where to begin her research?

  “Do you have a preferred side, mademoiselle?” Ambrose whispered, as quietly as he could.

  “A side?”

  “One half of the Memorial is dedicated to Babel’s heritage, and the other half to the heritage of the other arks. Here, all public buildings are divided in two.” Ambrose indicated the copper gutter tracing a demarcation line on the ground across the entire diameter of the tower. This line underlined the temporal difference between the original part of the building, all in ancient stone, and the part that had been rebuilt after the collapse linked to the Rupture.

  “It’s Babel’s past that interests me,” said Ophelia, turning to the oldest half.

  As they were making their way towards one of the vertical corridors, Ophelia looked up at a statue-automaton that, bolted to its plinth, was endlessly bowing and then straightening up its top half to welcome visitors. An inscription indicated that it depicted the first LUX patron to contribute to subsidizing the Memorial. Because knowledge serves peace, the commemorative plaque pompously declared.

  Looking up even higher, Ophelia saw a gigantic globe of the old world that was floating weightlessly under the glass dome. An intact world. A forgotten world. A world whose secrets she had the firm intention of extracting.

  She tensed up when she saw Ambrose’s chair going onto a curved ramp that enabled one to tilt gently from the horizontality of the hall to the verticality of a corridor. In a few seconds, he started to move as naturally as anything up the wall, without even losing his turban on the way.

  “Mademoiselle?” he whispered, when he noticed that Ophelia wasn’t following him.

  “I . . . I’ve never done that before.”

  “Take a transcendium? It’s child’s play. Walk straight ahead, without questioning anything.”

  Ophelia had expected to feel her stomach protesting along with her center of gravity, but at no time did she have the sensation of leaving behind terrestrial gravitational pull. The transcendiums could be gone up and down as easily as one walks up and down an ordinary corridor. She still felt pretty strange when, after a few steps, her eyes fell on the hall she’d left down below. It was as if the whole tower had upended itself.

  “The transcendiums and the topsy-turviums are the work of the Cyclopeans employed by the Memorial,” said Ambrose, whose chair was sliding along the marble with a clanking of gears. “That’s Babel for you: as soon as a foreign invention pleases us, we adopt it and adapt it.”

  Ophelia jumped. Somewhere in a fold of her toga, Thorn’s watch had suddenly opened and closed on its own, with an exclamatory click-click. Had her handling of it ended up animating it?

  Distracted, Ophelia bumped into a sweeper standing in the middle of the transcendium. He was so tall, so slim, and so bearded that he resembled his broom.

  “I feel bad every time I see him,” admitted Ambrose.

  “The sweeper?” she asked with surprise, while checking the watch had calmed down. “Why?”

  “My father has always fought against the servitude of man by man. The Memorialists should replace that man with an automaton, as they’ve done with the rest of the maintenance personnel.”

  Ophelia realized that, indeed, wherever she turned her glasses, Lazarus’s mannequins were there, discreet and omnipresent, polishing the cabinets and dusting the books.

  Leaving the transcendium was as disconcertingly easy as entering it had been; one just had to follow the curve in the ground leading to that floor. Ambrose guided her through the labyrinth of books and archives. The visitors around them were perfectly silent, each applying themselves assiduously to their research.

  Ophelia envied them. She herself hadn’t the slightest idea what she was looking for. She’d hoped that the mysterious memory she shared with God since her reading of Farouk’s Book would clarify itself by her visiting the Memorial. Nothing of the sort. Apart from its ancient stones, the building probably hadn’t retained a great deal of the school in which the family spirits had once lived. It was now nothing but a shell; the life form that had inhabited it had long been replaced by a different one.

  At the end of some shelving, Ophelia stopped in front of a poster:

  The Good Family seeks virtuosos.

  Are you a Memorialist at heart?

  Do you have a gift for tracking down information?

  Are you passionate about history and the future?

  Become a FORERUNNER in the city’s service.

  “That’s for Sir Henry’s reading groups,” whispered Ambrose. “They recruit all year round.” He raised his hand—the left one that was on the right—and Ophelia raised her glasses up to the ceiling of the floor above. Dozens of students in uniform were sitting there, heads down. They were in reading cubicles and were busily taking notes.

  “Are they all virtuosos?”

  “Apprentice virtuosos,” corrected Ambrose. “There are several guilds. Those ones are Forerunners—specialists in information. It’s been more than a year now that I’ve seen them working up there for the Memorial catalogue. They spend hours and hours reading. I don’t know how far they’ve got, but I hope they will soon be finished; one can’t borrow any books for the moment, just consult them here.”

  “Shush!”

  One of the students had interrupted his reading to look down—or up, depending on the point of view—in Ophelia’s and Ambrose’s direction. He frowned when he saw they were wearing white togas. “You powerless folk have no business being here.”

  “The Memorial is accessible to everyone,” Ambrose replied gently to him. “We are Godchildren of Helen.”

  “Powerless folk shouldn’t even have the right to utter the name of Lady Helen,” the student retorted.

  Ophelia had noticed that the Babelians aspirated their “h”s hard, but this one had said the name of Helen as if he wanted to fill himself entirely with it. As if it belonged personally to him.

  Ambrose turned the crank of his chair and moved off with a mechanical purring sound. He continued with his guided tour as if nothing noteworthy had occurred. Ophelia looked at him more than she listened to him. Being called powerless in public was thus that usual for him? His father was the inventor of all the automatons around here; he could have used his name to put that student in his place.

  “You’re a decent person.”

  Ambrose was so startled by Ophelia’s spontaneity, he almost lost control of his chair. “It’s rather that I detest conflict,” he stammered, with an embarrassed smile. “I realize that I’ve again imposed my presence on you, mademoiselle. I’ll let you visit the Memorial as you like. I’m off to look at the invention patents on the top floor; they always succeed in making me dream. Meet in the hall at midday?”

  “Will do.”

  When she found herself wandering alone around the shelves and cabinets, Ophelia suddenly became aware of how nervous she felt. She kept delving into her toga to grasp Thorn’s watch. Whenever she crossed a man who was a bit taller than average, she couldn’t stop herself from looking back as she passed, with a frantic pounding in her chest. It was absurd. Even if Thorn had already been to do research at the Memorial, it was unlikely that he would be there at that precise moment.

  And maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing, she thought, crossing some guards for the third time. The Memorial was under close surveillance; not an ideal meeting place for two fugitives.

  For a long time, Ophelia roamed the various rooms as she happened upon them. She looked closely at the collections—paintings, sculptures, ceramics, goldwork—but none of them seemed to have belonged to the old school. There were no military archives, either, as if even here, where the memory of humanity was supposed to reside, nothing remained of the wars of the past.

&nbs
p; I’m reasoning like an occasional table, Ophelia chided herself. If this place had formerly been a school, it was in the juvenile section that she’d stand a chance to find something. She consulted the plan of the building, and took two transcendiums. Each time it was a strange experience to be walking sometimes the wrong way, sometimes upside down.

  Once she was in the gallery for young readers, Ophelia read the labels on the shelves: “Alphabets and Primers”; “Rudiments of Learning”; “Civic Education”; Allegories of Old”; etc. She came across a class of schoolchildren who were remarkably calm for their age. As for her, she didn’t feel remotely calm. The more she scanned the shelves, the more she felt her anxiety rising. What if there was, quite simply, nothing to be found? If God had taken care not to leave the slightest trace of his past here? If Thorn had reached the same dead end? If he had left Babel a long time ago? Had he even set foot on it?

  While her head was swirling with doubt, Ophelia crashed straight into a trolley in front of her. The books stacked on it were sent flying, and, to add to the confusion, she dropped her own bag, whose contents spread across the floor.

  The man pushing the trolley didn’t get angry. He merely sighed and gathered up his books with resignation.

  “I’m so sorry,” Ophelia whispered, kneeling beside him, despite her toga.

  “You shouldn’t be, mademoiselle. I alone am at fault.”

  The man had said this with disillusion in his voice and a stoop, as if he carried the weight of the sins of the world on his shoulders. A badge saying “assistant” was pinned to his uniform. Ophelia retrieved her personal belongings, but they had got so mixed up with the children’s books that she found her fake identity papers caught between the pages of one of them.

  “But of course. You again, always you.”

  A woman had sneaked up like a cat. Her badge indicated that she worked at the Memorial as a “senior censor.” Her ears, slender and triangular as a cat’s, were pricked up with contempt. An Acoustic.

  “Throwing books on the floor. Books I had entrusted into your care. It’s an offense as much to my hearing as to my work.” The Memorialist spoke in a very low, almost inaudible voice, as if she couldn’t bear the sound of it herself.

  “Forgive me, Mademoiselle Silence,” replied the assistant, still returning the books to the trolley. Ophelia wanted to intervene, to explain that the fault was hers, but the Memorialist cut her short:

  “You are, and you will remain forever, a subordinate; you have no ambition. But that is not my case, so for pity’s sake, don’t tarnish me with your incompetence. Take that trolley over to my department, and don’t drop another thing.”

  “Yes, Mademoiselle Silence.”

  The assistant loaded on the remaining books and proceeded along the corridor, his head so sunken, it seemed about to disappear into his body.

  The Memorialist’s ears immediately swiveled toward Ophelia, swiftly followed by her eyes. “As for you, open up your bag.”

  Ophelia gripped the strap tightly. This woman inspired such dislike in her that, as a precaution, she moved back. It really wasn’t the time for her claws to show themselves.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m ordering you to.”

  “There’s nothing in my belongings of interest to you.”

  The Memorialist made a suspicious, somewhat disgusted face, and Ophelia then became aware of the state of her bag. From having dragged it around and lost it, she had turned this perfectly respectable piece of luggage into a disgusting, tattered thing.

  “That, little powerless one, is for me to decide. Since we no longer lend out books, we’ve seen no end of pilferers. Open your bag.”

  Ophelia felt a drop of sweat roll down her neck. Obeying would mean showing her false papers, and that wasn’t something she wished to do to a professional archivist, and a suspicious one at that.

  “Maybe you would prefer me to call security?” The Memorialist had whispered her question while tugging the chain on her uniform to reveal a whistle at its end. Just as Ophelia was wondering how to get herself out of this situation, there was a resounding crackling noise. The woman dropped her whistle to block her ears. Barely had the racket subsided than a booming voice, amplified by a megaphone, reverberated throughout the corridors:

  “Wake up, citizens! This Memorial’s just a massive joke! They’re amputating our past! They’re amputating our language! Down with the Index! Death to the censors!”

  “Him again,” muttered the Memorialist, looking offended. She turned her attention away from Ophelia, who took advantage of the diversion to scarper. The readers had all lifted their noses out of their books with shocked expressions, as the voice through the megaphone chanted, “Death to the censors! Death to the censors!” before giving way to an abrupt silence. Either the agitator had been stopped, or he had run away.

  Out of breath, Ophelia returned to the atrium, where Ambrose was already waiting for her. Sitting nonchalantly in his wheelchair, with a half-smile, he didn’t seem bothered by the incident.

  “It’s Fearless-and-Almost-Blameless,” he explained. “He always has to come and disturb the peace of this place. He barks a lot, but he doesn’t bite. He didn’t scare you, I hope?”

  Ophelia merely shook her head. If she uttered a word right then, right there, her voice would betray her distress. This visit to the Memorial was a disaster. Her bag weighed her down as if it were her own morale slung on her shoulder.

  Ambrose observed her with his gentle, antelope eyes. “You know, mademoiselle, the Memorial isn’t somewhere one can visit in half a day. I’ve been coming here regularly for years, and there are still a whole load of things that are unknown to me.” He raised his face, with a meaningful look, and Ophelia followed his eyes. The gigantic terrestrial globe that was gravitating above them was plunging them entirely in its shadow. “It’s not simply a decorative globe,” Ambrose continued, in a dreamy murmur. “It’s the Secretarium. Within it are stored all the collections that are not accessible to the public—the rarest and oldest. They say there’s a strongroom inside it, and in there can be found the ‘ultimate truth.’ Of course, it’s a tall tale to make kids dream, but I do believe that the strongroom really does exist.”

  Ophelia’s heart, which, just a moment before, had been heavy in her chest, started to beat like crazy. “The ultimate truth?” she whispered.

  Ambrose threw her a sidelong glance, disconcerted by the emotion coloring her glasses. “As I told you, it’s just a tall tale told to children, it’s not to be taken seriously.”

  Ophelia, on the contrary, took it very seriously. “How does one enter this Secretarium?”

  “It’s impossible, mademoiselle,” Ambrose replied, becoming even more disconcerted. “It isn’t even open to citizens. Only the Forerunners have access to it. And there again, only the most virtuoso among them.”

  Ophelia contemplated the globe, which, at this moment, had superimposed itself so perfectly on the midday sun that it was producing the effect of an eclipse. It was linked to no floor of the Memorial, was furnished with no gangway, and allowed nothing to be seen of the secret rooms it harbored. A sudden thought returned her to the students in the reading cubicles, and the recruiting poster.

  “In that case, I’ll be a virtuoso,” she declared, to Ambrose’s astonishment.

  THE APPLICATION

  The birdtrain took off. Ophelia had a final look at the statue of the headless soldier, guarding the entrance to the Memorial, surrounded by mimosas. She made him a promise. The next time she came to see him, she’d be ready.

  “The virtuosos are a true elite,” insisted Ambrose, who had boarded with her. “The Good Family is the conservatoire that everyone on Babel dreams of getting into. Believe me, mademoiselle, over there they only accept applicants with a unique talent. They’re highly selective.”

  “They recruit Forerunners all year
round, don’t they?”

  “The Forerunners are the top specialists in information. And you . . . eh bien, you’re not the most well-informed person I know.”

  Ophelia was only half-listening to him. Her attention was focused on the double ark, partly shrouded in wisps of the clouds that kept getting bigger on the other side of the window. The Good Family was such a huge conservatoire that, on its own, it took up two floating islands, linked by a bridge.

  As the birdtrain neared the landing stage, Ophelia checked that she really did have her false papers on her. “I’ll entrust my bag to you,” she said to Ambrose. “It made me seem like a scruff at the Memorial, and I’d rather not repeat the experience.”

  “Count on me, mademoiselle.”

  Ophelia hesitated. She would have liked to take the adolescent’s inverted hands into her own, and tell him how grateful she was for the kindness he’d shown her from the start. She couldn’t. It was always like this with her—the slightest emotion, and she fell apart. “You are . . . a good whaxi driver.”

  The statement drew a smile from Ambrose, a brief flash of white light against the bronze of his skin. “And you an unexpected client. Your bag and I, we’ll be waiting for you at my father’s. Good luck, mademoiselle.”

  Once she’d alighted, Ophelia returned Ambrose’s wave; he was encouraging her through the window as the powerful beating of the chimeras’ wings carried him off.

  The entrance to the Good Family was at the other end of the platform that served as a link between sky and land. It was framed by two statues that were so colossal, Ophelia had to shade her eyes from the blinding sun to make out their faces from the ground. A woman and a man. Probably Helen and Pollux.

  She followed the seemingly endless paved path that led straight to the main building. This evoked a cathedral of the old world, with its filigree-carved façade, flying buttresses, and stained-glass rose window. It all had such majesty: the white dome of the observatory; the great marble stairs; the buildings styled like ancient temples; and even the stature of the hundred-year-old trees that shaded the path entirely. An army of automatons were busy maintaining the gardens and cleaning the windows. The conservatoire was an actual town in its own right. The students who frowned at Ophelia as she passed by all wore elegant midnight-blue uniforms, embellished with silver. Ambrose was right: this place wasn’t accessible to ordinary folk.