The Memory of Babel

by Christelle Dabos

  ‘The strongroom,’ she then realized. ‘The ultimate truth.’

  With her glove, Ophelia gently rubbed away the dust that had settled on the mirror. If she was right, this object was several centuries old. No mirror could survive that long without losing its silvering. Normally, she shouldn’t have seen her reflection in it.

  And, indeed, it wasn’t her face that was reflected. The woman facing her had the same small stature, the same brown hair, the same glasses, but it wasn’t her.

  Their lips moved at the same time:

  “I am Ophelia,” said Ophelia.

  “I am Eulalia,” said the reflection.

  Ophelia closed her eyes, and then reopened them: her image had become her own again. She unbuttoned her gloves, put them in her pockets, and rubbed her moist palms together. She understood nothing that was happening to her, but she was sure of one thing: she had to read this mirror.

  She eliminated her thoughts, one by one, blowing them out like countless candle flames. When she felt ready, she pressed her bare hands against those of her reflection. The first vision to come to her was of her own fall through the mirror, as was entirely logical. From then on, nothing proceeded as expected anymore.

  Ophelia felt as though she were making her own reflection suck her up. Her memory turned itself inside out, like a glove. Ancient memories, from a different era, fulminated deep in her consciousness. The memories were so forceful that Ophelia tore in two, just as the building had once done. One half of her had suddenly become a stranger to her.

  That half looked exactly like the little woman she had seen instead of her own reflection. The woman was tapping away on a typewriter, facing the big mirror, at the time when there was still a wall for it to hang on. Ophelia saw through her eyes, like a spectator at the theater. Her hair, dark and unruly, hadn’t been washed for so long, it was sticking to her forehead. Her nose kept running, obliging her to use her handkerchief with one hand, while still typing with the other.

  “Soon,” she muttered to the mirror. “Soon, but not today.”

  Ophelia observed the scene through the eyes of the woman, with the mirror in between. At least, she tried to. The woman’s eyesight seemed to be as poor as hers, and she hadn’t put her glasses on. No one else was in the room, but there was crumpled paper all over the floor.

  There was a knocking on the door. Ophelia immediately stopped typing to pull a thick curtain across the mirror, covering it entirely.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  The door opened, allowing a vague silhouette to be seen, which Ophelia recognized as she got closer to it. It was the caretaker whose register she had evaluated. As in her dream, he was wearing small, steel-rimmed spectacles and a turban, its scarf attempting to conceal his war-injured jaw. He couldn’t refrain from frowning on noticing the paper and handkerchiefs strewn across the floor. His rigidity was a vestige of the military man he had once been.

  “No reflective material,” Ophelia reassured him, after conscientiously blowing her nose.

  The caretaker removed his spectacles in an efficient manner. But that didn’t stop his old hands from shaking. “We’ve got a blasted problem.”

  The dialect he spouted was unfamiliar to Ophelia. And yet she understood it without the slightest difficulty. She was even courteous enough to reply to him in his language:

  “Oh dear, what’s he done now?”

  “He’s killed all our blasted sparrows, that’s what he’s done. I didn’t want him going into that aviary, but he couldn’t stop himself. One day, I swear it’ll be me he kills.”

  The caretaker glanced nervously behind him, toward the door, as if fearing a presence on the other side.

  “Be patient,” Ophelia sighed. “He’ll learn to control himself like the others.”

  “He ain’t like them blasted brats, that one.”

  The caretaker disappeared from her field of vision. She rubbed her eyes, wearily. Thanks to typing without her glasses on, her eyes were smarting. And her chronic sinusitis didn’t help, either.

  “His role is different,” she said. “He protects the school.”

  “And I protect this blasted school, too,” the caretaker grumbled, through his deformed lips. “If those blasted soldiers reach our blasted island, I’ll chuck them right back into the blasted briny.”

  Ophelia rolled her handkerchief into a ball and threw it over to join the others on the floor, prompting an exasperated grunt from the caretaker.

  “You’re just a man,” she told him, gently. “And I’m just a woman. We’re limited, you and I. He isn’t. Between now and the coming of the new humanity, he’ll protect us all. Have faith in him.”

  Have faith in him. Those four words resonated through Ophelia as the old caretaker, the paper, the handkerchiefs, the typewriter, and the entire room faded away, like rings in water. When she was firmly back in the present, she was stretched out in the middle of the isolation chamber, frozen and burning at the same time, like some drowned person thrown up by the sea.

  She had left the Memorial’s second globe and crossed the gap in the opposite direction, without even realizing it. For a long time, she just stared at her reflection on the ground, blurred as it was by the drops of sweat dripping from her face. Her family power still quivered right across her skin.

  She had never felt so different. She had never felt so much herself.

  She knew everything. She knew where the book was that allowed one to become God’s equal. She knew who protected it and why. Or rather, she knew that she knew. She could glimpse all the answers pulsing through her veins, but didn’t yet have access to them.

  Ophelia got undressed, took a shower, and then ate some fruit. She experienced each sensation with a new acuity. She didn’t put her gloves back on; for once, she felt like touching the world without putting up a barrier. The omnipresence of her reflections no longer disturbed her.

  When she felt sufficiently rested, Ophelia sat in the middle of the mirrors and linked her hands tightly. This time, it was her own body she had to learn to read.

  She listened attentively to the ebb and flow of her breathing. She listened attentively to all her thoughts, even the most trivial. She listened attentively to the silence of the isolation chamber, which, little by little, became her own. Time disappeared.

  She forgot herself the better to remember.

  A flood of light poured into the isolation chamber, bouncing off the mirrors with the force of a river. It carried on its waves the sounds and smells of the jungle.

  The trapdoor up above had reopened.

  “Still alive?” Elizabeth’s phlegmatic voice called down.

  Ophelia got up slowly, blinded by the brightness of the daylight. A parcel immediately dropped into her arms. It was a fresh uniform.

  “Get ready, apprentice. The ceremony awaits us.”

  She did as requested. She knew exactly what she still had left to do.

  THE CEREMONY

  A squadron of luxurious airships, flying whaxis, and Zephyrian gondolas had descended on Babel’s Memorial. They were tethered there like gigantic fairground balloons, festooning the sky with a constellation of colors. Extra birdtrains had been laid on, but the minor ark was too small to accommodate them all; each had to stick to its allotted time at the station to avoid an accident.

  Ophelia alighted from one of them with the members of her division. No one had said a word to her during the journey, and for good reason: the Seers were staring at the toes of their boots. Maybe she was imagining it, but they all looked disappointed.

  They passed through the tall, glass doors of the entrance. Forerunners, lawyers, engineers, scribes, guardians, artists: all the Good Family companies were gathered in the huge atrium. So tightly packed were they, in their rows, that their uniforms appeared to be stitched together to create a vast, single length of midnight-blue fabric, embellis
hed with silver. Apprentice and aspiring virtuosos faced the rostrum on which the giant, twin family spirits were standing. Helen was as strangely disturbing, with her optical appliance and crinoline-on-casters, as Pollux was splendid. The latter was winking away benevolently at the faces turned toward him, but patently without the slightest idea of who anyone was.

  Ophelia was sent quite dizzy by the crowds that had invaded every gallery, every trancendium, every topsy-turvium, every bit of surface that could accommodate a pair of babouches. After the silence of her interlude in the isolation chamber, the contrast was disconcerting. Wherever she turned her glasses, there were people—in front, behind, upright, and upside down. The scholars from neighboring academies formed a sea of university gowns on their own. The reverberations of their whispering made all the glass of the cupola shake. Ophelia wondered whether the architectural balance that, miraculously, enabled the Memorial to straddle the void wouldn’t finally give way due to this surplus of visitors.

  Obliged to remain in her place, within her row, she discreetly looked for Thorn among the Lords of LUX lined up behind the family spirits. She didn’t find him, but she did spot Lady Septima, who was watching the statue-automaton’s clock as if expecting someone’s arrival.

  On the rostrum there was a golden dais, its megaphones awaiting their orator.

  Ophelia caught the eye of Octavio, in the Sons of Pollux division. It was the first time she was seeing him since their summons. He had stitches on his eyebrow and nostril, but they were less obvious wounds than those he bore inside him. His strained face told of the merciless conflict within. He ignored the signs of support from members of his own division, who were attempting to flatter him to the very last minute, in the hope that he would remember them the day he became a Lord. There was no question that Octavio would reach the grade of aspiring virtuoso today, but he no longer seemed that keen.

  As for Ophelia, she did want that stripe. Even if her chances were minute, her dearest wish was to become an aspiring virtuoso, and for Thorn to be there to witness it. She looked up at the Secretarium, floating like a planet above them. Would he come?

  Suddenly, Ophelia had the feeling of being watched. It wasn’t just down to nerves. Rather, it was as if something viscous was clinging to her skin. There was a spectator in the midst of the crowd who was focusing all attention on her, and on her alone. Someone had been watching her from the shadows for days, weeks, maybe even longer. She never saw them, but she was becoming increasingly acutely aware of their existence.

  Who?

  She noticed a movement. Blaise was making broad gestures of encouragement in her direction, from among the Memorialists who had come to watch the ceremony. She smiled at him, and then bit her lip as he accidentally whacked his neighbor. With all that had happened, she still hadn’t managed to give him the message from Professor Wolf.

  The Memorial’s automatons were among the front row of the staff. Even though the ceremony hadn’t yet begun, they were already applauding, making a metallic racket. The old sweeper was no longer among them. “It’s the spoilt-rotten brats like you who choose to give work to machines rather than to ‘decent citizens.’” Fearless was certainly no angel, but Ophelia couldn’t help feeling that a much-needed voice in Babel had died with him.

  One person who wasn’t noticeable by their absence, on the other hand, was certainly Lazarus. Seated on a private balcony, he was smiling modestly for the photographers bombarding him with chemical flashes. With his white-satin frock coat and vivid-pink spectacles, he reflected back all the lights. Ophelia hoped that, from where he was sitting, he wouldn’t recognize her. Ambrose wasn’t at his side.

  Ambrose . . . Ophelia now knew with absolute certainty that their paths would have to cross again soon. Very soon.

  She was starting to wonder what everyone was waiting for when the sound of an engine drowned out the murmuring. All heads turned like weather vanes toward the main entrance at the precise moment when, to Ophelia’s astonishment, an aeroplane appeared through the tall, glass doors. It was a biplane that seemed to have come straight out of a museum of the old world! It swooped above the atrium, circling the globe of the Secretarium. It plunged so close to the crowd that screams and turbans flew up. Ophelia gripped her glasses to see more clearly: two people were sitting casually between the wings of the biplane. There was a gasp across the entire Memorial when they tumbled out, as the plane was performing an aerobatic stunt under the cupola’s vast glass canopy. Two parachutes opened up. The acrobats slowly floated down the hundred or so yards between them and the ground, to thunderous applause. After a final loop, the plane flew back out of the entrance, just as it had arrived, forcing all the apprentices in the atrium to duck down. When Ophelia got back up, her hair a complete mess, she reflected that it was the most dangerously stupid thing she had ever witnessed.

  The two parachutists maneuvered so as to land in each other’s arms, right on the rostrum’s scarlet carpet. They kissed passionately, as though alone in the world, and then removed their flying helmets with such a flourish that the applause doubled throughout the Memorial. Their exhibitionism shocked no one. Ophelia wasn’t close enough to the rostrum to see them properly, but she was no less dazzled by their gold-painted hair and skin.

  The old gong sounded to restore calm.

  The couple went up the steps of the dais, hand in hand. The loudspeakers broadcast their voices as though they were but one voice: “Knowledge serves peace.”

  “Knowledge serves peace,” everyone in the Memorial responded in unison.

  It was right then that Ophelia realized that these strange creatures were in fact the Genealogists. They little resembled how she had imagined them. Looking closely, they weren’t that young, but their presence was as dazzling as their makeup. They saw themselves as suns, and, in truth, their radiance had totally eclipsed the presence of Helen, Pollux, and all the Lords on the rostrum, as if they were the true family spirits of Babel. Lady Septima herself was looking intently at them with a veneration Ophelia had never witnessed before from her. These people didn’t want to become God’s equals; they already considered themselves to be so.

  Thorn was really playing with fire by allying himself with them.

  “Today is a great day for our city!” the woman’s sensual voice proclaimed into the microphone. “We are celebrating a double dawn: the new catalogue and the new virtuosos.”

  “We are witnessing the reconciliation of the past and the future,” the man continued, with such perfect synchronicity, he seemed to be a natural extension of his partner. “The modernizing of research techniques has been effected in the service of our ancestral heritage. The human and the machine,” he declared, as the woman Genealogist made a point of indicating the automatons, “have attained a level of cooperation never equaled to this day. We must extend this model across the whole of Babel!”

  “To do so, we need citizens who are both knowledgeable and competent,” the woman seamlessly continued, this time looking lovingly at all the companies of virtuosos. “We need citizens of the caliber of Professor Lazarus, who is honoring us with his presence today, and who was once one of your own. We need citizens like you, Goddaughter of Helen!” she concluded, fixing her gaze on Elizabeth. “Your work on the database has been nothing short of remarkable. Come forward, Forerunner! Come and collect your third grade, which makes you forever a virtuoso citizen of Babel!”

  There was a certain voracity about this invitation that Ophelia found rather disturbing. Elizabeth, unusually flushed, went up onto the rostrum.

  It dawned on Ophelia that the Genealogists had made no mention of Thorn in their speeches. And yet he had been at the very nerve center of the project. Was that to protect his cover as Sir Henry? Or was it because they hadn’t obtained the only book they were interested in from him?

  Ophelia raised her glasses toward Lazarus’s balcony, just as he was ordering his mechanical butler to ph
otograph the scene. If they knew what she, she knew . . . !

  “Thank you, Forerunner!” the Genealogists continued, once Helen had handed Elizabeth her silver stripe. “You are proof that Babel is the ideal city, where descendants of the twenty-one family spirits, and also non-descendants, can work together for the best of all possible worlds! As a mark of our gratitude, please also accept this prize for excellence. Come, Goddaughter of Helen, join us!”

  Elizabeth went up the steps of the golden dais, where the even more golden Genealogists were holding out her trophy, also golden. Cornered by the couple, she clung onto her prize with both hands. Her long, flat body seemed to want to become even narrower, to lose what contours it had, to escape from the thousands of eyes focused on it. It wasn’t the first time Ophelia had noticed a vulnerability behind Elizabeth’s mask of indifference. She felt uncomfortable for her when the Genealogists pushed her gently, but firmly, toward the microphone.

  “Hmm? Oh, I . . . We just needed a management system . . . a standardized language . . . an algorithm for the instructions . . . that kind of thing. It’s really nothing but a simple research program. A bit like . . . like a memory. Our collective memory. The most important thing is the data itself. I wouldn’t have got anywhere without the reading groups and without Sir Henr—”

  “Bravo once again, citizen!” the Genealogists congratulated her, smiling warmly. “You may return to your place.”

  So it wasn’t that they had forgotten, thought Ophelia, as Elizabeth descended the steps of the dais, hiding behind her trophy. Thorn had been deliberately sidelined. Once again, she searched for him in the crowd at the Memorial, without finding him.