“Where is Mediana?” Ophelia insisted. “Where have they . . . taken her?
“It’s confidential. I can’t . . . divulge . . . that information . . . to an apprentice.”
Unable to keep going, Elizabeth stopped in the middle of the track. She was bent double, panting, with one hand stopping her radio-hat from falling off, and the other pressing a stitch in her side. Her complexion, usually wan, had reddened so much that it merged with her freckles. From spending her days sitting in a chair, her nose buried in her code, she had ended up with the physical constitution of an old lady.
Ophelia had tracked her down to the stadium to get some answers. For three days now, she’d been confronted by a wall of silence in her dormitory, three days of getting strange looks from a distance, with no word of explanation. Her patience was starting to run out and Elizabeth was the only one, out of the whole company of Forerunners, who wouldn’t be able to shake her off.
“Can you at least tell me what happened?”
Elizabeth unfolded her body as if it were an awkward ironing board. With her mouth wide open, she tried to catch her breath with her head up, having failed to catch it head down. “I told you . . . and I repeat to you. Apprentice Mediana . . . left us . . . for health reasons.”
“That makes no sense. She was the healthiest of all of us.”
“Listen, apprentice.”
Ophelia was all ears, but she had to wait until Elizabeth was able to speak without suffocating herself.
“It’s me who found her, and I can assure you, she wasn’t in good health at all. I entered the Memorial through the service door, like every Sunday. Catalogue cards to improve. I punched holes all morning. When I went to the bathroom, I found her lying on the tiles. I don’t know how long she’d been there, but it wasn’t a pretty sight.” Elizabeth wiped her sleeve under her chin, which was dripping with sweat. “Muscles in spasm, convulsions, eyes rolled upwards,” she specified. “I alerted security. Lady Septima summoned you urgently, you know what followed better than I do.”
Ophelia looked at Elizabeth in the pallid early-morning light. The picture she’d just painted so little resembled the splendid, the indomitable Mediana that her impassivity struck Ophelia as incongruous. Elizabeth was moving the aerial around on her hat to lessen the hissing of the radio broadcast, as if nothing had happened.
“How do you manage not to be afraid?”
“Hmm? Why would I be afraid? Strokes are rare at our age. Statistically, there’s little chance of the same happening to me . . . or to you. You’d know that, if you’d read the Official Journal. Which, for us Forerunners, must be the sole source from which we garner our information,” Elizabeth recited, like a well-learnt lesson.
“I don’t know much about statistics,” admitted Ophelia, “but don’t forget Mademoiselle Silence. A heart attack and a stroke in the same location, fifty days apart, that seems improbable to me.”
It was Elizabeth’s turn to look at her with incomprehension, from the shade of her half-closed eyelids. “I don’t know where you’re from, or what you’ve experienced, but here, in Babel, illnesses and accidents are the only causes of death. If Lady Septima tells us it’s a coincidence, then it’s a coincidence.”
Ophelia was tempted to retort that this woman she put on a pedestal didn’t set great store by powerless people like her. And that she probably wasn’t telling them the whole truth. The Lords of LUX had doubled the security staff at the Memorial; it was no longer possible to enter or depart without being checked.
And then there was Professor Wolf, his mysterious accident, his research stopped from one day to the next. He, too, was a regular at the Memorial, and he, too, had suffered a great traumatic shock.
No, it definitely wasn’t a coincidence. It was a crime. Three crimes. And the fact that that word was forbidden by the Index made no difference. Having accepted this hypothesis, Ophelia could no longer disregard Fearless’s message to Mediana. “He who sows the wind shall reap the storm.” Was it he who had tried to take her life, along with the lives of Professor Wolf and Mademoiselle Silence? If so, by what means and, most of all, why? What did an expert on wars, a senior censor, and an apprentice Forerunner have in common, apart from the fact that all three worked at the Memorial?
“Aspiring Virtuoso Elizabeth, Apprentice Eulalia, please complete your obligatory circuits!”
Ophelia turned her glasses toward the stadium’s watchtower, from which the command had come, and then back toward Elizabeth, who still hadn’t caught her breath.
“The best of all possible worlds, didn’t you say?”
They continued their run, side by side. Their two bodies were in perfect dissymmetry, Elizabeth’s being as long and flat as Ophelia’s was short and plump.
“You know . . . I didn’t like you . . . at our first meeting.” Elizabeth had casually panted this remark between two strides, her long, tawny plait thumping her back.
Ophelia agreed. “I’m not sure I thought much of you, either.”
“And now?”
They exchanged questioning looks, and Ophelia finally outran Elizabeth on the stadium’s track. The truth was, they could have become friends, had Eulalia really existed. But Ophelia was under no illusion: if the aspiring virtuoso discovered that she was lying about her identity, she would denounce her to Helen and Lady Septima without the slightest hesitation.
When she had completed her obligatory circuits, Ophelia went to the changing room. She bumped into Zen, who was just leaving, smelling of camellia oil. They stammered apologies. They might share the same dormitory and attend the same classes, but they had never exchanged more than one sentence. Zen was the oldest of the whole company, but she was more of a doll than a woman, always ready to hide her almond-shaped eyes behind her thick, black fringe. It seemed to Ophelia, however, that this habit Zen had of avoiding her was down to something other than shyness.
To fear?
Once alone, Ophelia collected the uniform and boots she had deposited at the laundry the previous day. She then went to the communal showers and there, after placing her clothes, gloves, and glasses on a chair, she stood still for a long while. She waited until her heartbeat, taxed by the run, had returned to normal. But it didn’t happen. Her entire flesh seemed to be pulsating to a single chaotic rhythm.
This evening, she would see Thorn again.
She had spent these recent weeks not allowing herself to think of it, remaining focused on everything that wasn’t him. She had virtually neither slept nor eaten. Her emotions were so muddled, it was impossible for her to untangle them. She wanted to be with Thorn right there, right now. She’d wanted that every second of every minute of every hour, for almost three years. And him, the best he could come up with was to impose three additional days on her! Learning Mediana’s translation off by heart? It was nothing but a disjointed, incomplete, and abstruse text that had given her no insight into Thorn’s ulterior motives. How had he become Sir Henry? Why had he joined LUX? What was he seeking, through the reading groups? What had stopped him, all this time, from giving a sign of life? Ophelia had given in to the temptation of reading the notes not merely with her eyes—after all, she had become their official owner—but those metallic gauntlets Thorn was wearing when he’d handled them had prevented him leaving any trace on the paper.
Reading the notes with her hands had taught her nothing about Mediana, either, no doubt also due to work gloves having been worn. The Seer had certainly duped her. All that time, she had known that Sir Henry was the man Ophelia was looking for. Would she have ultimately revealed it to her?
Ophelia unfolded a shower screen, threw her running gear over it, and yanked the water pull-chain. She kept her eyes wide open, despite the gush of boiling-hot water. The moment she closed her eyelids, even briefly, she saw Thorn’s expression again, imprinted on her eyeballs. His lack of expression, in fact. As though, really, all playacti
ng aside, Ophelia meant nothing to him.
While washing her hair, she tugged on her curls. She kept them short herself, with wary snips of the scissors, but never with the help of a mirror. Surely she hadn’t changed that much, had she? She squinted at her skin, tanned by the sun. Suddenly, she felt naked in a way that, never before, in all her life, had she felt naked. This abrupt awareness, ridiculous as it was, made her feel an apprehension she couldn’t really fathom.
“You hate being treated like a child,” Mediana’s voice mocked, in her memory, “but in front of a man, you remain an inexperienced bambina.”
Familiar clicking sounds cut through the noise of the shower. Ophelia released the pull-chain and wiped her dripping eyelashes. As nearsighted as she was, she could make out, under the screen, shadows on which there were glimmers of silver. The winged boots of the Forerunners.
“You will listen to us.”
“You will not scream.”
“You will say nothing.”
When the Seers spoke in the future tense, ensuing events generally proved them right. So Ophelia stood silently and waited to hear what they had to announce to her.
The answer came in the form of a bucket, pouring a crystalline torrent over the top of the screen. Ophelia barely had time to protect her face with her arms. In an instant, her whole body was grazed with hundreds of scratches. Once back to her senses, she contemplated the fragments of glass scattered over her damp body, and a few seconds later, the blood tracing a vast network of tributaries across it.
“That, signorina, is for our cousin.”
That sentence, even more than the pain, shocked Ophelia. Zen’s fearful attitude and Octavio’s insinuations suddenly appeared to her under a devastating new light. Her fellow students didn’t subscribe to the coincidence theory, either; they thought that she was the guilty one.
Ophelia opened her mouth, but the Seers’ hissing voices didn’t give her a second to stick up for herself:
“First Signora Silence, and now Mediana?”
“She sure moves presto, the new girl!”
“You’re no longer benvenuta in the Good Family.”
A silence ensued, during which Ophelia heard nothing but the drip-drip of the showerhead and the crunching of glass under her bloodied feet. She was shaking. The winged boots were still there, beneath the panel of the screen.
“This evening, signorina, you will go to the Secretarium.”
“This evening, signorina, you will again meet the automaton.”
“This evening, signorina, you will hand in your wings to him.”
It wasn’t a prophecy. The Seers’ power didn’t allow them to see the future beyond three hours. Ophelia still took the warning very seriously. Once the boots had departed with a jangling of silver, she remained standing in the middle of the glass, her blood mingling with the water from the shower.
THE AUTOMATON
Ophelia moved stiffly along the gangway. She hoped the bandages under her uniform would stop the blood from reappearing, at least until she got through what awaited her. Every movement pulled at the cuts in her skin. They weren’t deep, but they reopened at the first opportunity.
In actual fact, she felt no pain. Right now, she was conscious of just one thing: the globe of the Secretarium, in front of her, kept getting bigger as she moved forward. Even the void that stretched beneath her feet seemed abstract to her.
She was going to see Thorn again.
When she reached the globe’s reinforced door, Ophelia glanced over her shoulder at the transcendium at the other end of the gangway, where Lady Septima had entered her key to allow her access.
She was going to see Thorn again, in private.
Ophelia entered the Secretarium. As on her first visit, there was that same bizarre sensation of moving inside a replica in miniature of the Memorial. An identical atrium, an identical cupola, identical galleries, and, floating weightlessly in the air, a terrestrial globe that was the same, in every respect, as the one containing it. Ophelia knew perfectly well that this globe was purely decorative, but she couldn’t help imagining that there was another globe inside it, containing yet another one, and so on, ad infinitum.
She walked on, in the cold light of the bulbs. The freezing-cold room reserved for consulting fragile documents lay straight ahead. Was Ophelia supposed to go straight there to study the manuscript? She would be incapable of concentrating on anything at all until she had, at last, had a proper conversation with Thorn.
She ran her eyes along the stories of galleries encircling the atrium. In the eastern hemisphere, the glass cabinets of ancient collections glimmered between the columns. From the Secretarium’s western hemisphere there arose a click-clicking chorus: it was the thousands of cylinders of the database rotating on their axles, processing all those bibliographical-note punchcards.
As she was looking for Thorn, Ophelia jumped on hearing his voice right behind her: “Coordinator Room. Last gallery on the left.” The instruction had come from an acoustic pipe.
Ophelia went up, following the vertical wall of a transcendium. The wings on her boots clattered like spurs with her every step—wings she was supposed to hand in to Sir Henry, along with her resignation, if she didn’t want to suffer the reprisals of her division, but right now, that was the least of her worries.
She was going to see Thorn again, properly this time.
Although she knew the temperature of this place was strictly maintained at minus eight degrees, Ophelia felt as if it were fifteen degrees warmer. Never in her life had she cared about appearances, and yet she ran a nervous hand through her hair to tidy it up. She came across a few splinters of glass, and quickly got rid of them.
Once on the top floor, she went past the tall rows of cylinders; the mechanical racket they made hurt her ears. She finally spotted a door, with bolts and a sealed frame like the entrance to a submarine cabin. Instead of a cabin, Ophelia discovered a vast office, all wood and copper, and, at the far end of this office, a back.
Thorn’s back.
He was sitting on a swivel stool, with radio headphones over his ears, facing an immense console riddled with holes. It was the Coordinator, the only machine in the world capable of searching a database. Thorn was continually disconnecting and reconnecting a tangle of cables, lowering a switch here, lifting another there, like some instrumentalist tackling the most complex of scores.
Ophelia knocked on the door to announce her arrival, but Thorn didn’t appear to hear it. She was afraid of distracting him. She was afraid, period. Afraid of what would happen here when, at last, they would both be able to express their true feelings, freely.
She was afraid, yes, but she wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else.
Turning her attention back to her surroundings, Ophelia observed that the Coordinator Room was barely more welcoming than the Secretarium’s industrial galleries. There was no chair to sit on, other than the stool at the machine, nothing pleasing to look at except for shelves overloaded with documents, punched paper, and an array of time dials. This perfect fusion of austerity and organization was undeniably reminiscent of the Treasury, in the Pole.
Thorn suddenly swiveled his stool, checked the yellow tape that a mechanographic machine had just punched, and pressed the button of a microphone.
“The reference requested is ‘note No. 8.174, civil-engineering collection, 1S067.’ Over.”
As a tiny voice was responding through his headphones, he noticed Ophelia’s presence and indicated the sealed door to her, which she rushed over to bolt. With every turn of the crank, the deafening humming of the database outside became increasingly distant, finally becoming inaudible. Soon, there was total silence in the room.
“The apprentice virtuoso has just arrived,” Thorn then announced. “I have instructions to give her. I will return to processing the bibliographical requests as soon as that is done
. Over and out.”
He switched off the microphone, removed the headphones, and finally turned his stool around. His stillness was so abrupt and so prolonged, Ophelia wondered whether he was waiting for some initiative from her, but then realized that he was studying her in detail, from head to toe. He lingered on the braid of her uniform and the wings pinned to her boots. That piercing gaze made her feel as if her cuts were reopening, one after another, under the bandages, as he examined her.
“Why are you in Babel?”
An “r” crunched like ice, consonants as hard as stone: Thorn had regained his Northern accent. He had articulated his question slowly and methodically.
When Ophelia realized that it was actually to her, and not to Eulalia, that he was speaking, it completely threw her.
“I couldn’t bear to stay at my parents’ any longer.” Of all the stupid answers.
Thorn remained stony-faced on his stool, waiting to hear more. Ophelia’s throat was throbbing so hard, it felt as if her heart was stuck there. She felt like a funnel; intense as the emotions seething inside her were, when it came to expressing them, all that emerged was a pitiful drip-drip.
“I was astonished to discover that you were Apprentice Mediana’s replacement,” Thorn then continued. “Rather more than that, even.”
Ophelia found that really hard to believe. His inscrutable face gave nothing away. “Well that makes two of us. If I’d known that you were the famous Sir Henry, I would have . . . ”
“You could have been God,” Thorn interrupted her.
This remark caught her entirely off her guard. Her hands, which had gone limp, dropped the notes written by Mediana that she’d brought along, and they scattered around her feet in an avalanche of paper. “You think that I . . . that I’m . . . ”
“You could have been. I could have been, too. God knows our faces.”
It was so elementary, Ophelia felt ashamed not to have thought of it herself. “You’re right. Luckily for us, God is a very poor impersonator. If you had welcomed me with a smile, I can assure you, I would have been suspicious.”
The Memory of Babel Page 22
