Ophelia took off her glasses and gave her stinging eyes a long rub. After so long staring at text, she could see printed words even with her eyes closed. As she stretched in her chair, she looked up at the ceiling. Or rather, at the ground. Visitors were walking upside down there, moving silently between the library shelves. She always found it strange to think that it was she who was up above, and they who were down below.
She closed her book, and then checked, one last time, the catalogue entry she had just written. No print date, no mention of a publisher, and some worthy unknown by way of an author: evaluating this monograph had been a real headache, forcing her to keep switching between ocular reading and manual reading. She opened the compartment of the phantogram and saw, with relief, that nothing new had arrived. She couldn’t have handled one book more.
She glanced furtively through the latticed partitions separating her reading cubicle from her neighbors’. The Seers were bent over their books, in the haloes of the lamps. Of Zen, hidden behind her piles of ministerial archives, all one could see was a porcelain forehead beaded with perspiration.
Only Mediana sat with arms crossed in her cubicle. She was watching Ophelia with amused curiosity. “You’ve finished your quota, signorina? Me, too. Let’s go and do our holes together.”
Ophelia gathered up her index cards. As if she had the choice . . .
They deposited the catalogued books on the counter of the Phantoms, who, in truth, were hardly ectoplasmic. Endowed with impressive girths and brick-red coloring, they owed this name to their family power, which allowed them to transform any object from a solid state to a gaseous one, and vice versa. Once “phantomized,” the most voluminous documents could circulate by pneumatic tube, so it was possible to dispatch an entire collection of encyclopedias from one end of the Memorial to the other, in the blink of an eye.
Ophelia flipped from the ceiling to the wall, and from the wall to the ground, before taking one of the eight transcendiums serving the atrium. She didn’t check whether Mediana was following her; she could hear her boots clicking behind her. It was a taunting sound that accompanied her permanently, wherever she went, pursuing her even in her nightmares. Since this Seer had placed her hands on her, her life had ceased to be her own.
The sunlight pouring through the rotunda disappeared as soon as Ophelia moved into the shadow of the Secretarium. The gigantic globe of the old world floated weightlessly above the hall, as close and as inaccessible as it was in her dreams. Much as she passed, back and forth, beneath this globe, she couldn’t spot an opening in it. There was but one possible means of access: a gangway that led from the northern transcendium to a door that blended in so well with the illustrations on the sphere, it was invisible from the ground. The gangway was guarded by a sentry, relieved every three hours; it was deployed with the aid of a special key, of which very few individuals at the Memorial possessed a copy. Lady Septima only entrusted hers to her son, and, on more rare occasions, to Mediana and Elizabeth, when Sir Henry required their services.
Ophelia would have loved to know what had to be done to get into the good books of this automaton, who directed the reading groups without ever leaving his Secretarium. She still hadn’t met him, but once or twice she had chanced to hear the echo of his mechanical step on the lower floors of the globe, when the database—the punched cards of which were all stored in the Secretarium—broke down. Sir Henry gobbled up bibliographical references as a greedy pig does pastries. The rate of cataloguing he imposed on them was intolerable, and the entries never detailed enough for his liking. Ophelia couldn’t count the times she’d had to start some work from scratch again, after it had been returned to her stamped, in big, red letters, “incomplete.”
Lazarus had created his automatons to put an end to the servitude of man by man. Ophelia would have had one or two things to tell him.
She squinted. A cloud in the form of a snake flew through the air, went into a long spiral, and entered the terrestrial globe from the top. One could only see the glass tubes of the phantograms in the sunlight. They allowed documents to be sent straight into the Secretarium. For one crazy moment, Ophelia wondered if that might not be the best way for her to access it. The house rules strictly forbade the phantomization of human beings—only the most experienced Phantoms were capable of turning themselves into vapor without risking their lives—but she was desperate.
“As long as I’m alive, you’ll never go up there,” Mediana whispered to her, pinching her chin to turn her eyes from the globe. “Let’s make a detour, my vescica is fit to burst.”
Ophelia followed her under the peristyle and waited outside the door to the restrooms, as would an obedient dog. Never had she felt so humiliated. Her anger with Mediana didn’t, however, compare with that she felt with herself. She exchanged a stern look with her reflection, on one of the mirrors she could see through the half-open door to the toilet stalls. She had compromised Thorn, no more, no less.
“I’m not going to beat about the bush. You are not productive.”
Hearing Lady Septima’s voice ringing through the peristyle’s arcades, Ophelia stood to attention. In her haste, she scattered all her index cards at her feet. Not saluting a teacher, or, even worse, a Lord of LUX, meant instant punishment: she’d learnt that lesson through chores and detentions. It was not, however, to her that Lady Septima had just spoken, but to the old sweeper of the Memorial, who was methodically dusting each flagstone on the floor.
“It is the subsidies generously granted by LUX that maintain this building. Our Memorialists rely entirely on automatons’ orders. Accept it, their productivity is a hundred times yours.”
Ophelia raised her eyebrows, as she gathered up the cards she’d dropped. Lady Septima was waving a file under the nose of the sweeper—she was as short and muscular as he was tall and thin.
“We are grateful for your loyal and faithful service, old man, but it is time to make way for the future. Sign this paper.” Lady Septima was the embodiment of authority, her eyes and gold braiding making her blaze like a sun. And yet the sweeper simply shook his head.
Ophelia felt an instant, irresistible liking for him. Inside the pocket of her uniform, Thorn’s watch opened and closed its cover with a resounding click. The impertinent noise made Lady Septima swivel round.
“Apprentice Eulalia, do you not have work to do?”
If Ophelia’s hands hadn’t already been occupied picking up her cards, she would have squeezed the watch tight to stop it reoffending. It was becoming animated with increasing frequency, snapping its cover all over the place. For a poor, broken mechanism, it wasn’t short on repartee.
“I do, madame.”
“You don’t look as if you do. I was proud of your slight progress at the end of your probation period. You have slackened lamentably since then. Do not rest on your wings—they can be withdrawn from you at any moment.”
Ophelia held Lady Septima’s piercing gaze through the dark rectangles of her glasses. If this woman was as observant as her family power predisposed her to be, she would have suspected what was going on within the division of Helen’s Forerunners.
Maybe she did know about it.
“I will see to it that Sir Henry increases your reading group’s quotas,” Lady Septima declared, moving off with a military step. “Your colleagues will be most grateful to you, Apprentice Eulalia.”
A group punishment—Ophelia really needed that. Even so, she couldn’t refrain from giving a quick smile to the sweeper, who turned his big beard almost imperceptibly toward her without stopping his meticulous dusting.
“I’m going to end up thinking that you like being punished, signorina.”
Ophelia’s muscles all tensed at once. Having just come out of the restrooms, Mediana had leaned against her back with all her weight, so as to keep her kneeling in the middle of the scattered cards on the floor. Ophelia couldn’t see her smile, but could imagine it from the feline purring of her voice.
“Watch out,” she whispered in her ear. “Jinx straight ahead.”
Ophelia looked up, mortified. Blaise had abandoned his returns trolley right in the middle of the atrium to make a beeline for her. Mediana backed away as he got nearer. The assistant’s bad luck was notorious: wherever he was, whatever he was doing, a bookshelf would always collapse, or a lamp explode, as he passed.
Blaise crouched down to help Ophelia pick her up her cards; in his haste, he banged his forehead against hers. “Mademoiselle Eulalia,” he greeted her with a hesitant smile. “I tried so hard . . . You were never . . . Bon, I’m pleased to speak to you at last.”
It was, indeed, the first time they were speaking since their encounter in the birdtrain. And for a very good reason: Ophelia had scrupulously avoided bumping into him at the Memorial. She absorbed herself in her cataloguing when she heard his timid step close to the reading cubicles; she turned back whenever she came across his trolley around the corner of a corridor. He seemed so anxious to engage in conversation, he whose company everyone shunned, that she despised herself a little more every time she avoided him.
“Sorry,” she muttered, not daring to look him in the eye. “My apprenticeship takes up all my time.” She silently implored him not to persist, to leave it at that. How could she make him understand that he mustn’t confide in her anymore? Sensing, out of the corner of her glasses, Mediana’s thrilled interest in the two of them was unbearable.
Blaise leaned even further, his moist, hedgehog eyes obstinately searching for hers. “Mademoiselle Eulalia, if you would just accept to grant me even but a moment . . . ”
Ophelia took her cards out of his hands with such brusqueness that Blaise wouldn’t have looked more shocked if she’d torn his heart from his chest. “Sorry,” she repeated. She couldn’t be more sincere.
He raised his shaggy eyebrows, dumbfounded, and then a flash of understanding crossed his eyes. A painful understanding. “No,” he said, slowly moving backwards. “It’s I who am sorry.”
He went off again with his trolley, back hunched, but not without accidentally wheeling it over the foot of a visitor in the wrong place at the wrong time. Right then, Ophelia would have liked to have her formerly long hair back again; the disadvantage of short curls is that one can’t hide behind them.
“Aha, might I have missed a passing fancy among your countless secrets?” Mediana whispered to her, leaning on her shoulder. “Your poor husband, if he knew . . . ”
Ophelia couldn’t contain the deep dislike she felt any longer. Her claws had proved powerless before a dozen assailants, but they repelled Mediana with no trouble at all. The tomboy steadied herself with a pirouette and burst out laughing, as if she had just experienced a mere amorous rebuff.
“Ah, yes, I was forgetting. A little bit Dragon, our Animist.”
“One word more,” Ophelia said, through gritted teeth, “and I will put a stop to this blackmail myself.”
Mediana’s smile twisted into a pout of sincere sorrow. It always went like that with her. One moment masculine and insolent, the next sweet and feminine, as if she wore two carnival masks in turn. “I think it’s time we had a little talk, noi due. Let’s go and do our holes.”
In the Memorialists’ jargon, “doing holes” consisted of turning the handwritten entries into punched cards for Sir Henry’s database. With the card-punchers being noisier than typewriters, a soundproof room was specially allocated to them in the basement, so as not to disturb the readers’ peace. The ideal place to speak away from eavesdroppers.
“First, let’s check your work.” Mediana had said these words as soon as she had turned the wheel of the compressed-air door and reassured herself that there was no one else in the card-punching room. Perched on a stool, she went through Ophelia’s index cards, one by one. “You’ve improved,” she noted, with an appreciative whistle. “Your contextualizations are increasingly precise, bravissima!” She unscrewed the cap of a fountain pen and started crossing out every entry that Ophelia had spent hours cataloguing. “This should render your results a little less satisfactory.”
“Sir Henry will return it all to me, once again.”
Mediana’s eyes started to shine with the same brilliance as the precious stones set into her skin. The more Ophelia’s glasses darkened, the more Mediana’s face lit up. “It’s funny, you speak of him as if you feared angering him.”
“I do not believe that an automaton can get angry,” Ophelia retorted, in a muted voice. “But that’s not the case with me. Only the best accede to the Secretarium; by preventing me from doing well, you’re making me waste my time. I didn’t come all the way to Babel to be a slave to your caprices.”
“Yes, I sense that you’re finding the situation rather tricky,” Mediana sighed. “So I’m going to reveal to you why I care so much about becoming a Forerunner.” She returned the cards to Ophelia and placed her own on the stand of a card-puncher. This machine resembled an actual piano, with its winding stool and fine ivory keyboard. The noise it made at every touch, on the other hand, wasn’t particularly musical. “Because the Forerunners know everything about everybody,” Mediana sang out, above the din of the punching. “And it so happens that I’ve developed a real addiction to secrets!”
Sitting at her own machine, Ophelia couldn’t help but admire the dexterity with which Mediana’s fingers danced across the keys, without the slightest hesitation. As for her, she was still far from mastering the basis of the code invented by Elizabeth; with her clumsiness not helping, she was often obliged to start all over again due to hitting the wrong key.
“There are few domains in which you don’t excel,” Ophelia acknowledged, reluctantly. “You’re already way ahead of all of us, so why alter our results?”
Mediana smiled more sweetly as she slid another blank card into her punch. “Do you honestly think I would be where I am now thanks to my talent alone? My family power allows me to absorb not only the memories of those I touch, but also their knowledge. Do you know the reason why I managed to get into the Secretarium? Because Sir Henry and Lady Septima were in urgent need of a translator of ancient languages. And do you know why I suddenly became excellent at ancient languages? Because I laid my hands on many, many specialists. And allowed them, in return, to lay their hands on me.”
Mediana had added that last sentence so airily, while tapping away on her keyboard so cheerily, that Ophelia wasn’t taken in for a second. What this pretty tomboy had sacrificed to satisfy her appetite for knowledge had cost her more than she wanted to let on.
“And was it worth it?”
“All secrets are worth it. If it were just up to me, I’d spend my life in the Secretarium’s galleries, extracting its every mystery. You’ve already heard talk of the ‘ultimate truth,’ haven’t you? I have the firm intention of discovering one day what it is. That having been said, your own secrets aren’t bad, either, signorina.” Mediana paused her punching and, this time, shot a deadly serious look at Ophelia. “I’m going to be frank; some of your memories are very hard to interpret. I couldn’t make any sense of that fellow who can switch heads. I know at least one thing: you have put Babel in a very tricky position, your husband and you. The city has signed commercial treaties with all the arks, Anima and the Pole included. It is no place of refuge for runaways and fugitives of your sort. If LUX discovers who you are and who you seek, the risk to you is great. And that’s nothing compared with what will happen to your husband once caught. Babel advocates nonviolence, but, believe me, you wouldn’t want to know what goes on in their correction centers.”
Ophelia’s fingers slipped on her keyboard. She would have to throw away the card she was punching and replace it with a blank one. “So what next?” she said. “You’re going to denounce me?”
“No, signorina, but I would like you to understand that you’re in no position to complain. My blackmailing displeases you? Put up with it.”
“And what if I were to read your personal belongings without your permission? If I were to blackmail you over your own secrets?”
“I defy you to find a single one that would be more awkward than yours,” Mediana said, her smile tinged with kindness. “Let’s be serious: to whom, you or me, would Lady Septima give more credit?”
Ophelia stared at her crossed-out cards on the stand, breathing deeply, in and out, to disperse the grayness shrouding her glasses like smoke, to the point that she couldn’t see. She felt trapped. So, was she condemned, week after week, to punch incomplete cards? Should she give up looking for Thorn to protect him?
Mediana returned to her card-punching with the grace of a concert pianist. “You hate me. You all hate me. And the saddest thing is that you don’t hate me because of what I discovered about you. You hate me because you sense, deep down, that I am the person who understands you the most in the whole world. I stuck to your recent memories, signorina, but if I had gone right back to your birth, I would know you better than you do yourself.”
“You don’t know me.”
Ophelia hadn’t managed to stop her voice, when saying these words, sounding like a warning. Mediana’s arrogance, her gall in taking control of her life, set her every nerve on edge.
“Oh, but yes, I do know you,” Mediana gently insisted. “The absent one who haunts you, I know how afraid you are that you will never find him. And I know,” she added, after an eloquent silence, “how equally afraid you are of succeeding in doing so. You hate being treated like a child, but in front of a man, you remain an inexperienced bambina.”
Ophelia’s fingers began to shake so hard, she had to wedge them between her knees. The fleeting image of Mediana punching holes into her own tongue crossed her mind. The rest of their encoding session went by without a single word, both of them concentrating on their keyboards.
Mediana had soon finished her work, whereas Ophelia, totally preoccupied by what had just been said, continued to struggle with hers.
“A present.”
She contemplated, with incomprehension, the two cabaret tickets Mediana had just placed on her stand.
“I’m not as cruel as you think I am. I was being sincere, you know, when I told you I’d like, one day, to have you as my assistant. It’s in my interest to take care of you, and you’re very edgy. Tomorrow, it’s Sunday. Take your leave, hit the town, and get yourself over there.”
The thought of escaping Mediana’s clutches for a few hours was appealing, but Ophelia really didn’t like her obsession with controlling her schedule. “No thanks,” she declined, drily.
“It wasn’t a suggestion. You have no idea how many people I had to blackmail to obtain that address. You’re going there, punto e basta.”
“Why?”
Mediana placed her punched cards in the hoist. Her expression, behind her illuminations, had become enigmatic. At this moment, more than ever, she seemed to be wearing a carnival mask. “Let’s say, to simplify, that it’s not a respectable place. Up until now, I haven’t put a foot wrong, you understand? I’m not too keen to flaunt myself over there, but they say certain things are going on in the place. Compromising things. Go there not in uniform, preferably accompanied, and you’ll attract less attention. Gather information for me, and I shan’t be ungrateful.”
“You’ll release me?”
“No, but we’ll proceed to an exchange of information.”
“What information could you possibly have to offer me?” Ophelia stiffened when Mediana leaned slowly, sensually, over her, almost making her lose her balance on her stool.
“That tall oddball who serves as your husband,” she whispered, right into her ear. “I’ve already come across him. Here, at the Memorial.”
With a voluptuous flourish, she plucked the tickets from the stand and tapped Ophelia’s glasses with them; the glasses paled to transparency.
“Go over there for me, signorina, and I’ll tell you more.”