“My bag? But how?”
“Last night I sent a telegram to the Municipal Tram Company,” said Ambrose. “I reported the loss of your belongings. A courier came early this morning to drop them off here. I did tell you that honesty was a civic duty here. What is it?”
Ophelia had suddenly frozen, clutching the wide-open bag, her glasses turning blue. “My scarf’s not there,” she muttered. “Was it also returned to you? It’s three-colored, quite long, a bit lily-livered.”
Ambrose seemed disconcerted by Ophelia’s reaction; he had hoped she would burst with joy. “Eh bien, there was nothing else. Are your papers missing, too?”
“No. They’re here.” Her throat was so tight, her voice was strangled. Someone must have opened the bag and the scarf had escaped. Or worse: it had been stolen.
I must go looking for it, thought Ophelia. “Stick “missing” posters on all the walls, question people, scour every nook and cranny.
No. She couldn’t do that. When she’d hidden the scarf, it was precisely not to attract attention. As harsh as this decision might be, she had to stick to the plan.
“I’m so sorry,” stammered Ambrose. “You seem to attach importance to this object.”
Ophelia avoided looking him in the face as she slipped on the strap of her knapsack. How could she have made him understand that the scarf was much more than an object? How could she have explained to him that she had given it life, and that she owed hers to it in return?
“Thank you,” she said, in a choked voice. “You have been of considerable help to me. Right now, I must go to the Memorial.”
After an awkward silence, Ambrose turned the crank on his chair. “I’ll drive you, mademoiselle. On you get.”
The sun was rising over Babel, cutting through any lingering morning mist with its great blades, and casting the arcades’ shadows onto the cobbles. Ambrose’s chair moved from dark, little lanes to vast, light squares, avoiding the jungle of the gardens and the dust of the building sites. Perched on the rear running board, Ophelia looked gloomily at the crowd around them. Among all these togas, kaftans, tunics, shawls, harem trousers, belts, babouches, turbans, parasols, where was her scarf?
None of the marvels Ambrose was showing her could shake her gloom; neither the great cascades of the Pyramid nor the monumental statues of Helen and Pollux nor the agora, with its imposing amphitheater nor the power exchanges in the city center, where the top engineers of all the arks gathered daily.
Ophelia’s interest was solely directed at the sun-shaped LUX emblem, engraved in the marble of every building, stuck on the columns of every forum. She had even noticed it on the inside of her toga, embroidered in gold thread.
“Who is . . . LUX?” she asked, out of breath. She was pushing Ambrose’s chair to help him up a seemingly endless incline. It was no easy task: she kept skidding on the needles that the umbrella pines, shaken by a searing wind, rained down on the cobbles.
“A very ancient institution, mademoiselle. They are patrons who make their wealth available to all enterprises deemed of public service. True philanthropists!”
Ophelia rubbed off, on a cobble, a blob of resin stuck to her sandal. Philanthropists whose signature was on every wall of the city, all the same. “I deduce that they’re pretty influential.”
“One could say that, yes. They preside at the Mint, at the Familistery, and at the Court of Justice. The Lords of LUX are not merely at the service of the city, mademoiselle. They are the city. Sir Pollux and Lady Helen themselves take no important decision without consulting them. It is also they who instigated the Index I told you about. You know, the ban on mentioning anything to do with . . . eh bien . . . the war,” he whispered, very quietly.
Ophelia didn’t need to know any more to understand that the Lords of LUX were to Babel what the Doyennes were to Anima: Guardians in the service of God. If their grip on the ark was as absolute as Ambrose’s explanations led one to believe, she’d have to be doubly vigilant to escape their notice.
Deep in these thoughts, she jumped when she was hit in the face by a feather so large that it flicked loudly against the lenses of her glasses. The slope they had just ascended opened onto a huge terrace overhanging the void: beyond the wide, stone balustrade, the sky stretched out endlessly. The terrace extended into a railway bridge, on which a train awaited, with the clouds its sole destination. The last passengers were hurriedly piling into the carriages.
“We’re right on time,” said Ambrose, with a smile for the platform clock. “Let’s hurry to get on.”
Ophelia struggled to do as he said. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the gigantic, winged creatures perched on the roof of the train. A Totemist, identifiable by his night-dark skin and golden hair, was circulating among them to check their harnesses. “Are they Beasts?”
Ambrose waited until he had managed to get his chair into the nearest carriage before answering Ophelia. “Chimeras, mademoiselle,” he said, inserting their two travel cards in the on-board machine. “They have the strength of the condor and the docility of the canary.”
The stationmaster blew his whistle, and the scratching sound of the birds’ talons on the train’s roof reverberated across the metal. Since all the seats were occupied, Ophelia instinctively clung onto Ambrose’s chair. “But a train, isn’t that a bit heavy for birds?”
“Of course it is,” Ambrose replied, to her extreme consternation. “They don’t carry it, they propel it. The birdtrains are made to be weightless. The worst thing that could happen to us, if these birds stopped flying, would be to remain suspended in the middle of the sky. It won’t happen,” he assured her, indicating a shaven-headed woman milling around the passengers’ seats. “There are always Cyclopeans on board to control the gravitational fields. Reassured, mademoiselle?”
“Almost.”
Ophelia leant against a window as the train glided through the air, emitting metallic grating sounds. She glimpsed the powerful beating of a wing up above, and the slow swirling of the clouds down below. The experience reminded her of the flying sleighs of Citaceleste, although this was even more impressive.
Seeing that the birdtrain didn’t plunge into the void, she finally relaxed and looked around at the other passengers, who, with the indifference of regulars, paid more attention to their books than to the view. She found them all surprisingly young and serious, so focused that no one spoke to anyone.
“Students,” whispered Ambrose. “This birdtrain will serve the five academies and the virtuosos’ conservatoire before reaching the Memorial. We thus have time ahead of us. Did you know that several attempts have been made to explore the void between the arks?” he asked her, straight off. “It seems that no living being can remain there for more than a few hours. The deeper one goes, the worse it is—even birds don’t risk it. There’s sufficient oxygen, but even so, it’s physically intolerable. My father tried it out for himself, with a spacesuit he invented. He wanted to take a photograph of the world’s core, you know, where there are those perpetual thunderstorms. He lasted six hours and thirty-nine minutes. He admitted to me that they were the most challenging six hours and thirty-nine minutes of his entire life. As if, down below, there was a force that hadn’t wanted him. Don’t you find that extraordinary, Mademoiselle Eulalia? Our whole planet seems to want to remind us that, before, all that emptiness was filled up. My father thinks it’s a shame because it would be much quicker for him to travel from one ark to the next by crossing the void in a straight line, without having to respect the curvature of the old world.”