“Mademoiselle?” he whispered, when he noticed that Ophelia wasn’t following him.
“I . . . I’ve never done that before.”
“Take a transcendium? It’s child’s play. Walk straight ahead, without questioning anything.”
Ophelia had expected to feel her stomach protesting along with her center of gravity, but at no time did she have the sensation of leaving behind terrestrial gravitational pull. The transcendiums could be gone up and down as easily as one walks up and down an ordinary corridor. She still felt pretty strange when, after a few steps, her eyes fell on the hall she’d left down below. It was as if the whole tower had upended itself.
“The transcendiums and the topsy-turviums are the work of the Cyclopeans employed by the Memorial,” said Ambrose, whose chair was sliding along the marble with a clanking of gears. “That’s Babel for you: as soon as a foreign invention pleases us, we adopt it and adapt it.”
Ophelia jumped. Somewhere in a fold of her toga, Thorn’s watch had suddenly opened and closed on its own, with an exclamatory click-click. Had her handling of it ended up animating it?
Distracted, Ophelia bumped into a sweeper standing in the middle of the transcendium. He was so tall, so slim, and so bearded that he resembled his broom.
“I feel bad every time I see him,” admitted Ambrose.
“The sweeper?” she asked with surprise, while checking the watch had calmed down. “Why?”
“My father has always fought against the servitude of man by man. The Memorialists should replace that man with an automaton, as they’ve done with the rest of the maintenance personnel.”
Ophelia realized that, indeed, wherever she turned her glasses, Lazarus’s mannequins were there, discreet and omnipresent, polishing the cabinets and dusting the books.
Leaving the transcendium was as disconcertingly easy as entering it had been; one just had to follow the curve in the ground leading to that floor. Ambrose guided her through the labyrinth of books and archives. The visitors around them were perfectly silent, each applying themselves assiduously to their research.
Ophelia envied them. She herself hadn’t the slightest idea what she was looking for. She’d hoped that the mysterious memory she shared with God since her reading of Farouk’s Book would clarify itself by her visiting the Memorial. Nothing of the sort. Apart from its ancient stones, the building probably hadn’t retained a great deal of the school in which the family spirits had once lived. It was now nothing but a shell; the life form that had inhabited it had long been replaced by a different one.
At the end of some shelving, Ophelia stopped in front of a poster:
The Good Family seeks virtuosos.
Are you a Memorialist at heart?
Do you have a gift for tracking down information?
Are you passionate about history and the future?
Become a FORERUNNER in the city’s service.
“That’s for Sir Henry’s reading groups,” whispered Ambrose. “They recruit all year round.” He raised his hand—the left one that was on the right—and Ophelia raised her glasses up to the ceiling of the floor above. Dozens of students in uniform were sitting there, heads down. They were in reading cubicles and were busily taking notes.
“Are they all virtuosos?”
“Apprentice virtuosos,” corrected Ambrose. “There are several guilds. Those ones are Forerunners—specialists in information. It’s been more than a year now that I’ve seen them working up there for the Memorial catalogue. They spend hours and hours reading. I don’t know how far they’ve got, but I hope they will soon be finished; one can’t borrow any books for the moment, just consult them here.”
“Shush!”
One of the students had interrupted his reading to look down—or up, depending on the point of view—in Ophelia’s and Ambrose’s direction. He frowned when he saw they were wearing white togas. “You powerless folk have no business being here.”
“The Memorial is accessible to everyone,” Ambrose replied gently to him. “We are Godchildren of Helen.”
“Powerless folk shouldn’t even have the right to utter the name of Lady Helen,” the student retorted.
Ophelia had noticed that the Babelians aspirated their “h”s hard, but this one had said the name of Helen as if he wanted to fill himself entirely with it. As if it belonged personally to him.
Ambrose turned the crank of his chair and moved off with a mechanical purring sound. He continued with his guided tour as if nothing noteworthy had occurred. Ophelia looked at him more than she listened to him. Being called powerless in public was thus that usual for him? His father was the inventor of all the automatons around here; he could have used his name to put that student in his place.
“You’re a decent person.”
Ambrose was so startled by Ophelia’s spontaneity, he almost lost control of his chair. “It’s rather that I detest conflict,” he stammered, with an embarrassed smile. “I realize that I’ve again imposed my presence on you, mademoiselle. I’ll let you visit the Memorial as you like. I’m off to look at the invention patents on the top floor; they always succeed in making me dream. Meet in the hall at midday?”
“Will do.”
When she found herself wandering alone around the shelves and cabinets, Ophelia suddenly became aware of how nervous she felt. She kept delving into her toga to grasp Thorn’s watch. Whenever she crossed a man who was a bit taller than average, she couldn’t stop herself from looking back as she passed, with a frantic pounding in her chest. It was absurd. Even if Thorn had already been to do research at the Memorial, it was unlikely that he would be there at that precise moment.
And maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing, she thought, crossing some guards for the third time. The Memorial was under close surveillance; not an ideal meeting place for two fugitives.
For a long time, Ophelia roamed the various rooms as she happened upon them. She looked closely at the collections—paintings, sculptures, ceramics, goldwork—but none of them seemed to have belonged to the old school. There were no military archives, either, as if even here, where the memory of humanity was supposed to reside, nothing remained of the wars of the past.
I’m reasoning like an occasional table, Ophelia chided herself. If this place had formerly been a school, it was in the juvenile section that she’d stand a chance to find something. She consulted the plan of the building, and took two transcendiums. Each time it was a strange experience to be walking sometimes the wrong way, sometimes upside down.
Once she was in the gallery for young readers, Ophelia read the labels on the shelves: “Alphabets and Primers”; “Rudiments of Learning”; “Civic Education”; Allegories of Old”; etc. She came across a class of schoolchildren who were remarkably calm for their age. As for her, she didn’t feel remotely calm. The more she scanned the shelves, the more she felt her anxiety rising. What if there was, quite simply, nothing to be found? If God had taken care not to leave the slightest trace of his past here? If Thorn had reached the same dead end? If he had left Babel a long time ago? Had he even set foot on it?