Blaise stared wide-eyed. The corners of his mouth quivered, like a flickering candle flame. “It’s the first time in my life that I’ve heard someone say that to me.”
“The Good Family!” announced the conductor.
Ophelia shook the hand Blaise had politely held out to her, despite the encumbrance of her oversized gloves. “I have the firm intention of joining the reading groups,” she told him. “We’ll see each other again soon at the Memorial. In the meantime, take care, and ask yourself what really killed Mademoiselle Silence.”
From the landing stage, Ophelia’s eyes followed the silhouette of the winged train as it continued on its path across the sky. The rain had stopped the moment it had pulled away from the ark. ‘I mustn’t,’ she thought, with determination. ‘Offering my friendship to a Memorialist would be unreasonable. Dangerous, even.”
She was forced to admit, realizing she suddenly felt less alone, that it was already too late.
THE WELCOME
The articulated arms kept moving, like tentacles, around the principal chair. They were endlessly sorting the Good Family’s papers, and their perpetual motion made Helen’s stillness behind the imposing marble desk even more striking. The giant woman was staring at the file she was holding with her long, spidery fingers.
Ophelia felt as if she’d been waiting an eternity for her verdict. She turned her attention to the desk lamp, which emitted a flickering light. She had screwed and unscrewed so many bulbs during the pre-morning chore, she had to control her urge to change this one.
Helen’s cavernous voice gave her a start. “Going by Lady Septima’s report, you deigned to make some effort during your three weeks of probation.”
Ophelia suppressed the words that came to her mouth. She wouldn’t describe two hundred hours of radio lessons and applied readings, not to mention all the chores, as “some effort,” but so be it. “I did my best, madame.”
Helen lifted her elephantine nose from her file. In the midst of the mechanical ballet of her chair, she recalled one of those ancient goddesses with several arms, half-woman, half-monster, of whom one still found sculptures on Babel’s oldest walls. “Is doing your best enough? Lady Septima isn’t impressed, either, by your evaluations. You lose yourself in the subjectivity that permeates objects, but history is a science that demands rigor. We don’t practice vagueness here, we require context. You have shown signs of progress, I read it in your file. However, virtuosos mustn’t be good in their field; they must be excellent.” Helen’s mouth cracked into a grimace as wide and toothy as that of an abyssal fish. “Calm down, young lady, your heartbeats are hurting my ears.”
“I will become excellent,” promised Ophelia, who was totally incapable of calming down.
“I have two questions for you, apprentice. Here is the first: what have you learned during these three weeks of probation?”
Ophelia had to admit that she’d expected something a little more concrete. In her head, she formulated all sorts of fine sentences, searching for the one that would most pleasing, but Helen interrupted her, abruptly:
“Don’t think. Reply to me now, with total sincerity, in as few words as possible. What have you learned?”
“That I know nothing.”
The statement had almost sprung from Ophelia’s lungs. It wasn’t exactly what she had intended to say, but Helen gave her no chance to expand on it, going straight to her second question:
“Why do you want to become a Forerunner?”
“I . . . In fact, I thought—”
“Why?” Helen’s voice was now more sepulchral than ever.
“To put my hands in the service of the truth.”
“In the service of the truth,” repeated Helen. “Might it not have been good form to say ‘in the service of the city’?”
Ophelia allowed herself a moment’s thought, recognizing that she’d been given a chance to go back on her words, and then decided to follow her instincts. Helen wasn’t Pollux. Helen wasn’t the puppet of Lady Septima and the Lords of LUX. Helen thought for herself and made her own decisions.
“You asked for a sincere answer.”
Helen then directed her optical appliance at Elizabeth, who was standing to attention near the door, so silently that Ophelia had forgotten she was there.
“Remind me who you are.”
“I’m . . . I’m in charge of the second division of Forerunners, madame. I coordinate the reading groups.”
Ophelia couldn’t resist giving Elizabeth an astonished glance. In the three weeks she’d been around her, it was the first time she’d detected any uncertainty in her voice. Outwardly, however, she still had the same expressionless face, unhealthily pale behind its freckles, with the heavy eyelids of a sleepwalker.
“That I already know,” Helen stated. “Why, otherwise, would you be attending this interview? What I want to know is your name.”
“Elizabeth.”
These four syllables, stiffly articulated, reinforced Ophelia’s impression. It was almost a distress call.
Helen hit the piston keys of a keyboard. A mechanical arm instantly extended, telescopically, to open the flap of a writing desk at the back of the room. Ophelia was astonished to see that, on it, there was a giant book with pages as thick as skin.
No, not a book. A Book, with a capital B. Helen’s Book.
Ignoring it, the mechanical arm opened one of the writing desk’s many drawers and pulled out a register, which it placed on Helen’s desk.
“A good system for a bad memory,” Helen commented, not without irony, as she flicked through the register. “Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Elizabeth . . . Ah, yes, you are the one without a power. Your virtuosity is with databases. Oh? It’s to you that I owe my personal consulting system? Yes, I seem to recall, now,” she declared, closing the register. “I think I can trust in your judgment. Do you think the apprentice here present is worthy of interest for the reading groups?”
The silence that ensued made Ophelia feel uncomfortable. If her acceptance into the Good Family depended on Elizabeth’s opinion, it didn’t bode well. The division leader didn’t raise her nose from her algorithms often enough to know the apprentices she was in charge of. Her devotion to the city and the Memorial made her blind to the rest of the world.
At least, that is how Ophelia saw her, so she was amazed to hear her reply:
“I think she is worthy of interest, period, madame.”
Pensively, Helen tapped the marble of her desk with her fingernail. Once, just once, Ophelia would have liked to meet her eyes, but she knew that was impossible: without her corrective appliance, this family spirit saw people as but a galaxy of atoms. Just as the room’s compressed-air door stopped her from hearing the muttering, sneezing, grumbling of the students of her conservatoire.