The Memory of Babel

by Christelle Dabos

  “Doña Mercedes Imelda. A remarkable woman.” Fearless had said these words without flinching, but without hesitating, either. He reached over to the console and grabbed one of the frames. “This young demoiselle beside Doña Imelda,” he said, placing his finger on the other woman, “is my great-grandmother. I knew her less well than I would have liked, but she made a mark on my childhood. She, like Doña Imelda, was a free spirit such as one no longer encounters. One must admit, they still knew how to have a laugh in those days! There were already killjoys to teach you to speak proper and walk straight, but not like today. Not like today.” He put the frame back in its place, and then drilled his penetrating gaze into Ophelia’s glasses. “My great-grandmother left us half a century ago. At a vrrraiment great age. I therefore have my doubts that you ever knew Doña Imelda in person, lambkin.”

  Ophelia clenched her fists. “I grant you that I’m small, but I’m definitely no lamb. Listen,” she insisted, seeing Fearless break into a mocking smile. “Mother Hildegarde was, without doubt, a very old lady, but she had a constitution of iron and a mind of steel. She would even still be alive if . . . if she hadn’t . . . ”

  Ophelia couldn’t say it. That body sucked down into her pocket, the dislocating of limbs, the cracking of vertebrae . . . It was impossible for her to evoke that memory without seizing up. It was her emotion, even more than her words, that seemed to make Fearless decide to swallow his skepticism.

  “Do you know why the orange is a vrrraiment important fruit?”

  She hadn’t expected that particular question. “Er . . . it cures scurvy?”

  “It’s a very ancient legend,” said Fearless, crossing his legs on his radio transmitter. “I heard it from my great-grandmother, who herself heard it from her distant ancestors. The story goes that the angels were living in the gardens of Knowledge, while humans were groveling in the dark caves of Ignorance. And that’s how it remained for millennia. One day, however, a man—or a woman, depending on the version of the story—entered, by accident, the gardens of Knowledge. A poor peasant, lost and famished. He saw golden apples. He picked one. Barely had he taken a bite out of it than his mind opened. Suddenly, he became aware of his ignorance, of the ignorance in which all his fellow humans were kept. He stole other golden apples, distributed them to the men and women, and, together, they emerged from the caves of Ignorance to discover the world. ‘Golden apples,’” continued Fearless, after a long, dramatic pause, “is the name our ancestors gave to oranges. And that’s why it a vrrraiment important fruit. That’s why people such as Doña Imelda and I have made it our rallying sign. It’s the symbol of all those who want to free themselves from the ignorance in which we’re forcibly kept. Between you and me, mademoiselle, I can see no difference between the angels of the legend and the Lords of LUX.”

  He had spat out that last word with such loathing that his tiger snarled and let out a growl that made Blaise fall off the bench.

  Ophelia wondered to what extent Fearless was aware of the existence of God, as Mother Hildegarde had been. The question almost slipped out when she suddenly remembered why she was there. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, of what was being said at that very moment, in that dressing room, that she would be able to hide from Mediana, if the latter decided to delve into her memory.

  With resolve, she unwound the turban that was hiding her face and looked Fearless straight in the eye. “You wanted to know the reason for our presence in your cabaret. The truth is that I was asked to have a good look and listen around it. I give you my word that Mr. Blaise has nothing to do with any of this. I therefore suggest to you that we stop our exchange right now and each go our own way. In fact,” Ophelia added, as an afterthought, “you should look for a new address for your cabaret.”

  Fearless, sitting astride the radio set, considered her for a long time in silence, and then threw back his head and let out a howl of laughter. All the glass in the frames shattered to pieces.

  “Did it not occur to you that it would be vrrraiment simpler to set my tiger on you? I am Fearless-and-Almost-Blameless! Where does the ‘Almost’ come from, in your opinion?”

  “But I thought . . . Mother Hildegarde . . . Doña Imelda,” stammered Ophelia.

  “But seriously, what were you expecting? That I open my arms to you, crying ‘the friends of my friends are my friends’? Grow up a bit, little girl.”

  Fearless had lost all his bonhomie. He eyed Ophelia with a scorn he didn’t attempt to conceal. At this moment, he was no longer the great rabble-rouser with a tenor’s voice. And neither was he an insignificant-looking little balding man. He was a third individual, an entirely different one.

  A wild beast who had made fear his ally.

  From an inside pocket of his tunic, he pulled out some tickets to his cabaret. “You came to me because I accepted that you do so. I was hoping for someone else, if truth be told. Your charming colleague, for example. Mademoiselle Mediana. There’s a girl who’s incapable of minding her own business, no? Being predatory runs in her blood! If, one day, she were to enter the ranks of LUX, she would make a formidable adversary for me.”

  Fearless observed a silence during which Ophelia had ample time to hear her heart, and that of Blaise, pounding.

  “In one hour,” he continued, “everything will have disappeared: the sign, the tables, the stage, the equipment in my dressing room. Not because you advised me to do that, little girl, but because it’s my way of life. The cellars of Babel offer infinite possibilities and it’s me, only me, who decides where I go and who comes to see me.”

  Fearless got up and his tiger copied him, with a muscular stirring of fur.

  “I won’t kill you. I don’t attack lambs, only wild beasts interest me. Merely convey the following message to Mademoiselle Mediana.” He lowered his voice until it was reduced to the sound of distant thunder. “He who sows the wind shall reap the storm.”

  THE COMPASS

  “Are you . . . used to that sort of thing?”

  Those were the first words that Blaise managed to utter, once back at ground level. He had leant against one of the ancient baths’ ruined columns, breathing in deeply through his nose, under the disdainful gaze of the fruit sellers. His pantaloons, soaked in sweat, had lost all their fullness.

  Ophelia went to the closest fountain to get some water for him to drink. The searing heat of the bazaar, buzzing with people and flies, offered a stark contrast to the catacombs.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, handing a beaker to Blaise. “Really sorry.” That was all she could say, again and again. All that she’d experienced in the Pole—the Clairdelune dungeons, the Knight and his hounds, Farouk’s tantrums, the countless assassination attempts, not to mention her encounter with God—had hardened her to intimidation. But that was part of her own life, not Eulalia’s.

  Blaise looked at her, goggle-eyed. “Any more and my heart would have packed up. Mon Dieu! It’s him, isn’t it? It’s him who killed Mademoiselle Silence?”

  “I don’t know.” And that’s what exasperated Ophelia. Had she met him in other circumstances, Fearless could have taught her a great deal. “Will you be alright?” she asked, concerned.

  Blaise nodded, but that head movement alone made him regurgitate all the water he’d just swallowed. “You . . . you must find me very emotional, Mademoiselle Eulalia,” he said, shamefully wiping his mouth. “The truth is, I have a cat phobia. That one was . . . particularly large.”

  “I’m really, really sorry,” Ophelia muttered, as the bazaar gongs rang out. “My leave is coming to an end. I must return to the Good family, and deliver my message, and . . . and . . . ”

  “And claim my compensation,” she thought to herself. Much as she wanted to stay with Blaise, the need to know what Mediana had to tell her about Thorn, that was urgent.

  “We’ll have to do this again,” she tried to joke. “Without the saber-toothed tiger.”


  As she returned his turban, now like an unraveled ball of wool, Blaise contorted his lips into a grimace that was probably meant to be a smile. “Eh bien, another time, maybe?”

  “So sorry, again.”

  Ophelia would have liked to add something more intelligent, but once more, the words escaped her. She crossed the bazaar at a run, tripping on carpets and bumping into passersby. She was sure this meeting with Blaise would be the first and last. She was equally sure that it was best that way.

  So why couldn’t she bear the thought?

  With every stride, anger made her blood boil. Mediana had deliberately put her in danger. She hadn’t hesitated to make use of her most intimate secret, to play with her most fragile hope to satisfy her own curiosity. Now that Ophelia had fulfilled her part of the deal, she had an ominous feeling about it.

  He who sows the wind shall reap the storm.

  “If Mediana has lied to me,” she thought, clenching her jaws, “if she’s made it all up about Thorn, I’ll make sure that I myself become that storm.”

  As though reflecting her inner state, the sky became increasingly oppressive. A miasma of clouds lowered above Babel, but it was a storm without lightning, or wind, or rain. Ophelia struggled to catch her breath as she went up the slope, fringed with umbrella pines, that led to the belvedere; those daily laps of the stadium hadn’t yet made an athlete of her.

  She sighed with relief when she saw she’d arrived just in time. The birdtrain coaches were in the process of landing on the platform tracks, carried by the powerful beating of the chimeras’ wings. Soon, passengers were pouring out of them. Ophelia boarded one, inserted her card in the ticket machine, and looked for a seat. It wasn’t easy: the students of all the academies spent their Sundays in town, and always waited until the last birdtrain to return to their lodgings.

  Barely had Ophelia sat down when she heard, on the other side of the window, a mechanical clicking that made her jump up. A wheelchair, maneuvered by an adolescent with dark skin and white clothes, was moving off along the platform, in the midst of the passengers who had just alighted. Ophelia rushed to the nearest door and leaned over the step.

  “Ambrose?”

  He had heard her. Ophelia knew that from the way his shoulders had shuddered at the sound of his name. He had heard her, but he continued on his way without turning around.

  Ophelia never shouted. But she couldn’t help the imploring cry that burst from her lungs: “Ambrose!”

  She saw the inverted hands grip the levers of the wheelchair, as though fighting the desire to halt it, but unable to make that decision. Ophelia wanted to run over to him, look into his eyes, ask him what she’d done to anger him, beg him not to leave her to face alone all that she still had to face.

  That second of hesitation cost her the chance. The conductor closed the carriage door. She looked disparagingly at Ophelia’s toga and sandals, their whiteness lost to the dust of the catacombs.

  “One does not make a spectacle of oneself on the public highway, powerless one. Draw attention to yourself once more, and I’ll book you.”

  As the birdtrain sped along the tracks and laboriously took flight again, Ophelia sat back in her seat. Wearily, she removed her glasses, leaned her forehead against the window, and stared at the hazy clouds swirling in the void.

  She felt downhearted.

  Her ominous feeling had become a certainty. Mediana would tell her nothing at all. Blaise would want to have nothing more to do with her. He would withdraw his friendship, just as Ambrose had before him. Ophelia wouldn’t gain access to the Secretarium, wouldn’t discover more about God’s past, wouldn’t find Thorn. She would forever be a slave to blackmail, and spend the rest of her days punching little holes in cards.

  It was the conductor’s voice, through the birdtrain’s loudspeakers, that jolted her out of her torpor: “Apprentice Virtuoso Eulalia, member of the second division of the company of Forerunners, is requested to present herself at the front of the train.”

  Ophelia put her glasses back on and got up, under the students’ curious gaze. She was as surprised as they were. She elbowed her way through the succession of carriages to reach the inspectors’ compartment. The conductor, in the middle of repeating her announcement into the loudspeaker, stopped on seeing her arrive.

  “What do you want, powerless one?”

  “You called for me. I am Eulalia.”

  “You’re an apprentice virtuoso? You’re an apprentice virtuoso,” she repeated, this time as a statement, having noticed the Good Family-stamped card Ophelia was handing her. “I imagined you to be more . . . less . . . anyway, it’s good news to have found you at last, Mademoiselle Eulalia. I’ve been making this announcement repeatedly, for two hours.”

  “Two hours? Why? What’s going on?”

  The conductor took off her cap and wiped a handkerchief over her pink, egg-shaped head, shaved the Cyclopean way. The air was even more stifling inside the train than out. “My only instruction is to take you to the Memorial. Lady Septima—glory to LUX!—has summoned you there very urgently. I don’t know what you’ve done, but it seems like a serious matter.”

  Ophelia, struck suddenly by the obvious, felt her legs go weak. Mediana hadn’t sent her to the cabaret to make use of her, but to get rid of her. She’d denounced her to Lady Septima, no less!

  Ophelia risked expulsion. Or worse, prison.

  She quelled the panic and anger surging up inside her, and did some quick thinking. If Lady Septima wanted to see her at the Memorial, not the conservatoire, it was to avoid having to involve Helen. Perhaps Ophelia would have a chance by pleading her case with the principal.

  “I must get off first at the Good Family,” she said, with all the confidence she could muster. “I’m in civvies, I can’t present myself to Lady Septima not wearing the regulation uniform.”

  The conductor seemed to reflect on the matter, then grabbed her loudhailer: “Your attention please. Exceptionally, this train will not be stopping until the Memorial. We would ask you to bear with us; we will stop at each academy on the return journey. The Birdtrain Company will supply confirmation of the delay to anyone requesting it. You, Mademoiselle Eulalia, stay right here, like a good girl,” the conductor instructed, after hanging up her loudhailer. “If you have a clear conscience, like all decent citizens, you have nothing to fear.”

  Ophelia sat on the foldaway seat assigned to her. The trap had closed. She clasped her hands together, on her thighs, to try to conceal their shaking.

  She looked around for a way of escape, knowing full well she wouldn’t find one. All the train’s doors opened onto the void. There were no mirrors onboard, and even if there were, would she still be able to pass through them? Since her arrival in Babel, not a single day had passed without her lying to someone, about her identity or her intentions. This deception was greater than all the playacting she might have done in the past. It wasn’t merely a disguise, as Mime’s livery had been; it was a second skin that, day after day, had become second nature. After continually thinking of herself as Eulalia, could she still claim to be Ophelia?

  The journey to the Memorial seemed both horribly long and abominably short to her. Her worst fears were confirmed when saw a troop of vigilantes awaiting her on the landing stage. They weren’t armed—the very word was an offense—but they didn’t need to be. They were all Necromancers, masters of temperature, capable of paralyzing with cold at a mere glance. They were also first-rate manufacturers of freezers.

  They escorted Ophelia without uttering a word to her. As they passed the statue of the headless soldier, she felt like a criminal being led to a court-martial. Once through the Memorial’s big glass doors, she was overwhelmed by the silence reigning within. This quiet bore no resemblance to the usual whispering of readers; it was a total absence of sound. The great circular galleries on each floor were all deserted, giving the e
ntire place the feel of an abandoned temple. The cloak of clouds bearing down on the rotunda cast its shadow over every nook and cranny. The suspended globe of the Secretarium, whose metal usually glinted in the sun, today looked more like a dead planet.

  The Necromancers made Ophelia take the northern transcendium. She tensed upon seeing, in the middle of the huge vertical corridor, a small figure with red-glowing eyes. When Ophelia had gotten close enough, she was surprised to see that it wasn’t Lady Septima, as she had at first supposed, but her son, Octavio. He was watching her through the long, black strands of his fringe and his eyebrow chain. He exuded such suspicion that Ophelia felt condemned before having even been tried.

  “You’re keeping everyone waiting, Apprentice Eulalia.”

  She didn’t respond. She knew that, from now on, her every word could be used against her. She would say nothing for as long as she didn’t know of what, exactly, she stood accused.

  She thought Octavio was going to take her to the private room, where Lady Septima and the Lords of LUX had their headquarters, on the top floor of the Memorial, but instead, he took out a key from inside his uniform. Ophelia couldn’t believe her glasses when he inserted it into the lock on a post, which then sprang a metal gangway over to the Secretarium. That terra incognita she’d been barred from when playing the model pupil, she was being invited into it, now that she’d fallen from grace? It was unbelievably ironic. She followed Octavio onto the spiral stairway that allowed one to swing from the horizontal position of the transcendium to the vertical position of the gangway. Barely had Ophelia set off down the latter than her hands clutched both handrails. She didn’t suffer from vertigo, but they were more than one hundred feet above the ground, and the thought of walking on a gangway that could be lifted by the mere turn of a key didn’t really reassure her. She glanced back at the Necromancers, who, having remained in the transcendium, were now standing perpendicular to her.

  The closer Ophelia got to the weightless globe, the more she gauged its giant proportions. The red-gold coating of the earth’s crust dipped wherever there were oceans, and defined in relief the contours of continents. The reinforced door that Octavio opened, somewhere within a southern sea, was a perfectly respectable size, and yet it gave the impression of being a tiny keyhole.