Victoria couldn’t understand a thing the Golden Lady was saying; her words reached her as though through water, and yet she was starting to feel a little uneasy. The Golden Lady’s mouth didn’t hesitate at all anymore. Victoria had followed her this far because it had seemed a fantastically fun adventure, but, in fact, she wasn’t having that much fun. She could just make out, in the Other-Victoria’s ear, Mommy’s tiny voice, fretting—“the little darling gets increasingly lost in her daydreams”—and could feel, like the lightest touch, her warm hand stroking her hair.
She was just about to return to having Mommy’s warm skin against hers when the Golden Lady pulled aside a drape behind the counter to go into a back room. Victoria’s curiosity meant she couldn’t resist following her. The call of the journey was, once again, strongest.
She froze when she saw the Golden Lady leaning over a Second Golden Lady. She wasn’t seeing double, as with the carriage in the road. This Second Golden Lady was reclining on a large, white carpet and staring wide-eyed, a smile of pure joy on her lips, her veil and its pendants spread around her like a beautiful golden puddle.
Red water was trickling out of her nose and ears.
She was watching, without seeming to see them, bodies as transparent as the smoke from a hookah pipe, totally naked, half-woman and half-man, who were whispering words against her lips that only she could hear.
Victoria understood nothing of what was unfolding before her eyes.
With a single gesture, the First Golden Lady shooed away the naked bodies floating around the Second Golden Lady. “That illusion was perhaps a little too strong for you,” she told her. “You, my poor children, are such fragile creatures!” With her red-taloned hand, she closed the Second Golden Lady’s tattooed eyelids. “Rest in peace, my dear, your death was not in vain. Thanks to your face, I may succeed in swirling the wave. Saving the world.”
With these words, the First Golden Lady slowly raised her head toward Victoria. She didn’t seem to see her, but she was squinting and staring at the corner of the room where she was, as if she sensed her presence. All her shadows immediately began to writhe and slither under her feet, as if wanting to hurl themselves at Victoria.
“And you, my child? Would you also like to help me save the world?”
The next moment, everything had disappeared: the two Golden Ladies, the white carpet, the back room. Victoria had returned to being the Other-Victoria at the house. She was strapped once more into the too-narrow baby chair. Mommy, smiling, was holding a spoonful of jam out to her.
Victoria opened her mouth to scream. Not a sound came out.
THE SLAVE
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.