Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (12 page)

“Mysteries.”

“Yes. But there was a brief mention of a third case.” He looked at you and patted you on the shoulder. “A marginal case, where people lost all sense of their own identity, but acquired a holy reputation because they were seers, credited with knowledge of the gods. Knowledge of the future, even.”

You’d been listening to every word. “There is no time,” you said.

“Do you mean that we have to hurry, before the Architects come back? I couldn’t agree more about that.”

“They will return,” you said. “They’re already returning. Infinite and hungry.” And with that you shrugged, as if talking to us was useless, and walked ahead down the slope through the dry bunchgrass to the campsite.

“A bit epigrammatic,” Partridge said. “But he’s more articulate than I expected.”

“That was pretty much the most he’s said since Ararat.”

“You’re right—he knows something, and he’s trying to communicate it. He may not even know what it is he knows, but it’s in there. Keep listening to him.”

“I think—” I said. I couldn’t believe I was actually going to say it, but Partridge had kind of a knack for making me feel that anything I said would be OK. “The Architects got to Iona. But I think he—”

“Yes?”

“After she died in Patagonia, he kept hearing her voice. He said it was like she was urgently trying to tell him something. And I think, at Ararat—”

“He succeeded in communicating with her in some way? As if she, or some part of her, had continued to exist?”

I couldn’t say anything. I just looked at him.

“Well, my dear, you have an open mind as well as a quick one. That’s a good thing. They don’t always go together.”

It was a clear evening, and the air temperature dropped sharply as the sun set. When a breeze came up, everyone reached for hats and jackets—or everyone except Partridge, who just stood there, oblivious, in the same thin white shirt and shabby brown corduroy jacket.

He had his stick hooked over one arm. A thin lock of hair moved back and forth across the front of his scalp like a weather vane. He was still as a statue. Then, without warning, he raised the stick like a sword, turned slowly as if about to defend himself from attack, and pointed it at a star on the horizon.

“Fiery orange dot, low in the southeast. Ella?”

“That’s Antares rising.”

“Indeed yes. An unstable red supergiant a thousand times the diameter of the sun. Getting near the end of its life, just like me. Though, due to lack of mass, I am relatively unlikely to explode. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be around when Antares goes pop!”

“Any chance that’ll happen this evening?” Rosko asked.

He shook his head. “Sometime in the next half million years, maybe.”

“Oh. I was wondering if it’d be worth staying up all night, in case.”

Ella turned from examining the telescope. “If you’re willing to stay up all night, Rosko, so am I. Who knows? We might get lucky.”

Kit was standing next to me, pressed up against me, twining her fingers in and out of mine. “I think Rosko maybe not so smart about this?” she whispered. “Maybe Ella have to bite his ear before he is getting hint?”

I still hadn’t heard from Jimmy and Lorna. I still didn’t know what the Architects were, when they were going to come back, or whether I needed to understand what they’d done to you—where you’d
been
—in order to get you back. But we’d retrieved the images of the Disks, which I was convinced would lead me to a breakthrough. And now, for the first time in my life, I’d found someone to be with who knew instinctively, better even than you, how to allow me to be
me
.

Amazing to relate, D, but Kit just
wasn’t interested
in the fact that I speak a dozen languages and have a photographic memory and a six-sigma IQ. She’d seen through all that, seen right through to the neurotic mess underneath, and for some strange reason liked it, felt comfortable with it, was even attracted to it. She’d unbuttoned my whole persona, peeled it off, and underneath—

Sorry. Time to switch metaphors. Shoes! I felt like someone who’d spent her whole life in shoes that never quite fit, and she’d thrown my shoes away and handed me a pair that did. It was so thrilling to be wholly, uncomplicatedly
me
for the first time in my life; so thrilling that it was easy to pretend there was nothing wrong with the world. Nothing I can’t do now! The Architects are toast! Daniel’s as good as cured!

It’s amazing what the hormonal equivalent of being drunk as a skunk can do to a girl’s judgment.

“I feel stronger now,” I said to her later, as we lay in a spare tent that Ella had discreetly made available. “I feel as if I can cope with anything now. It’s like I can see a path forward. Like there’s a ray of hope.”

Such a cliché, that,
ray of hope
. But I have to tell you: it was a super-nice feeling while it lasted.

P
ART
II:

Z
ONE OF
M
IRACLES

C
HAPTER
8

G
OD
’
S
M
ONSTERS

The day started well. I’ll give it that.

I woke up early, feeling newly energized and hopeful.
Get back to Seattle ASAP,
I thought
. Get back to the Disks, and I can kill three birds with one stone.
Bill had said we could translate the language of the Disks if only we had enough text for his software to work with. Now we did have enough—which meant I was going to succeed him as the world’s most famous linguist
and
reveal the six-thousand-year-old secret of the Architects
and
find a way to cure you of whatever they had done to you.

Time for work!

Except that no one else in the campsite was up. Nothing but a grunt of mild annoyance from Kit. Silence from most of the tents. Snoring and boy-funk when I stuck my head in the one you were sharing with Rosko. And when people did emerge from their burrows, an hour or more later, they stretched and yawned, and wanted to take forever cooking breakfast burritos, and then noticed how good the sun felt and started throwing a Frisbee around. As the day grew more perfect, the vacation mood got more and more annoying—especially when Kit, of all people, said to Rosko that I was in “some kind of mood, whatever,” and the two of them took you for a two-hour walk.

At least it was a chance to get Partridge back on track. “What did you mean, history repeating itself?” I said, pulling up an old folding deck chair at the side of his van. He handed me a mug of undrinkable instant coffee.

“Gods, spirits, aliens. It doesn’t matter what you call them, because they’re probably beyond our understanding anyway. But they want us, they need us, and it’s bad news. Ararat was just the start. With every new Ararat, they will get stronger and harder to stop. They made us what we are, and you and I need to understand them if we’re going to help defeat them. This isn’t just about helping Daniel.”

“I know,” I said. “But Daniel is one of our best hopes for understanding them. So I have to focus on him too.”

I wanted to pour the coffee onto the grass, but he kept looking right at me. “You’ve heard of this Murakami fellow? Japanese physicist? Higher mathematics was never my strong suit, but he’s interesting. The first person to ask exactly where all that explosive energy is coming from, and the first person to point out that conservation requires an equal amount of energy to be going somewhere else. The idea that consciousness itself could be a hidden aspect of physical reality is absurd, of course, and it doesn’t make a whit of sense according to our existing physics. But then I seem to recall that ‘
E = mc
²
’ was a bit of a shocker once. Maybe the man’s onto something.”

At last the three of you returned, and it was time to go. “Rosko,” I said. “You want to ride with Ella again, don’t you? Thought so. Good.”

“Uh, aren’t you coming with us?”

“We’ll keep Professor Partridge company. That all right with you, Professor?”

“Certainly.”

“Kit, you mind being with Daniel in the back?”

She stuck out her bottom lip, for about a tenth of a second. “I do you deal. I sit with Daniel in back, then you let me call you Majka.”

“What?”

“Majka. Is your new nickname. I invent.”

“When? Why?”

“When I invent is five minutes ago. Why is because proper Russian nickname for Morag is Moragashka, and is too big the mouthful. Majka is better.”

“What’s wrong with Morag?”

“Nothing! But I want special name for you, yah? Name which is for me only. And I choose, if you like, Majka.”

She said it slowly, drawing out the first syllable and then doing some complicated Russian thing with her tongue on the second:
MAH-dz’j-ka
. It made me feel like someone had removed the bones from my knees. “You can call me anything you want,” I said.

Finally, on the road! I had just enough time to untwist Brunhilde’s antique nonretractable seat belt, get settled in, and—pop. In the middle of nowhere, less than half a mile into a four-hour drive, a flat tire. And the spare was damaged. Which meant Ella had to drive Partridge to a town forty miles away to get a replacement.

It was still a nice day: as Ella helped her new astronomy buddy change the tire, herds of fat little clouds were grazing picturesquely eastward through columns of sunlight under a sky the color of old denim. But it was already late afternoon, and the weather was changing. Big fists of wind were pounding the roadside grass. An ominous gray band had risen on the western horizon.

Brunhilde could manage only forty miles an hour against the gusts, but she got up to sixty on the long downhill to the Columbia River—or sixty was my best guess, given that the red pointer behind the speedometer’s cracked glass was jerking around between forty and eighty like a limbo dancer on acid. Partridge was in a good mood. “I love to drive,” he said, as he failed to slow down on a tight, steep curve, ignoring the fact that Brunhilde, riding high on her skinny tires, had museum-quality brakes and was thirty years short of an air bag. I forced a smile and hung on tight to the little plastic hand-strap.

Your drawings were becoming quicker, more economical, and more disturbing. One, featuring a man in flames on top of a volcano, could have been Mayo, or maybe your father, impossible to tell. Another showed me in water, clearly struggling. But as we made our labored progress toward Seattle, you began a long series of drawings—twenty at least—of flames coming out of large buildings; you kept showing them to Kit, or to me, bringing them to our attention.

“You are thinking about the libraries, yah?” Kit said. “We have no Internet for whole day; I wonder if there is new stories.”

I reached for my phone, only to discover I’d slung it in a bag that was now strapped to Brunhilde’s roof. Kit must have been reading my mind. “I am having nothing,” she said, shading her screen with one hand. “Maybe because mountains. Maybe because phone is cheap old piece of bullshit.”

I considered trying to explain why
bullshit
wasn’t the right word.
A phone can’t be bullshit, Kit. That’s a quality of what someone says, not of a thing. Rosko told me there’s a philosopher who wrote a whole book about it. Apparently his main point is that bullshit is—

Maybe not. Instead I reached for the dashboard radio, only to discover that there wasn’t one. A metal bracket was bolted to the underside of the dash. A bundle of wires poked out of it.

“Sorry,” Partridge said. “The radio broke about ten years ago, and I never replaced it.”

“You drive three thousand miles without music?” Kit said, sounding horrified.

“Not quite. I know vast amounts of Italian opera by heart, so I sing to myself. Very badly, but—” he patted the dashboard—“I have a forgiving audience.”

In the silence that followed, while I waited for Partridge to burst into an aria, you reached forward and put another drawing in my lap. Partridge glanced at it out of the corner of his eye.

“You’ve a talent there, Daniel. It looks frighteningly real.”

“What do you make of this?” I asked him. “The libraries—is this what you meant when you said, ‘History is repeating itself’?”

Before answering, he negotiated the rest of the downhill run and swung onto the long, low bridge over the Columbia. The wind was even stronger in the gorge, pushing whitecaps upriver against the current. Brunhilde drifted, loped, and staggered, an exhausted marathon runner nearing the finish line.

“Just putting the jigsaw together in the best way I can, Morag. All my decades of research, plus your discovery of Shul-hura’s alternative Babel story, plus what we found in the
Geographika
. The disappearances. The rise of the Seraphim. And Ararat, of course. My guess is that the library fires in the ancient world started for the same reason they’re starting now: the Architects put into a few influential heads the idea that we needed to
back out of
human culture, so to speak. Destroy all records! Destroy the very languages! Wipe the slate clean! If the
Geographika
is anything to go by, the whole of Theran civilization was devoted to that project. They were obsessed with being worthy of the ultimate privilege—immortality. Anabasis was the end of life, in both senses of the term, and that required the right kind of purification. After Thera was destroyed, every culture in the region became divided between believers and rebels, so you had an almost permanent state of region-wide civil war. The Architects encouraged it and took what they could get. That’s the Bronze Age Collapse—a mopping-up operation.”

He was talking to all three of us at once, and he’d twisted around in his seat, only one hand loosely on the wheel. “Watch out for bicycle!” Kit shouted. He swerved hard, narrowly missing a startled-looking couple on a tandem bike, and carried on as if nothing had happened.

I wanted him to say more about the Architects. I wanted him to get beyond his hippie-dippie “ancient gods” talk and say what he truly believed about them. Instead he started talking about his hospital stay.

“They did all those X-rays in Rome because they were worried that I had a skull fracture. The brain is soft tissue, so it doesn’t show, and what you get is a picture of your own empty skull. Rather alarming! But you know how the brain looks, don’t you, the two hemispheres? Like a walnut.”

“I am thinking, like two pieces of bread dough put in bowl that’s too small,” Kit said. “Like, God made two brains for each person, but put both into same skull. And not enough space, so they kind of squish.”

“That’s a good image,” Partridge said. “And there might even be something to it. Bill Calder and I were fans of a theory called bicameralism. Two chambers in the brain, like two chambers in Congress. The idea is that the two hemispheres of the brain really did act like two separate brains for most of our history.”

“I think that work as well as snake with the two heads,” she said.

“If the two halves were equals, yes. But the bicameral theory says our hemispheres were more like master and slave. Most people think humans became conscious over a long period of time, slowly rising from the mental level of the lower animals, then dogs, then apes, to where we are now. But the bicameral theory says that the big mental differences between animals and humans came much more recently. Back in the early Bronze Age, five or six thousand years ago, nobody had anything like our sense of individuality, personal agency or choice, free will. All anyone had was voices in the head. Inner gods, telling them what to do.”

“So,” Kit said. “This theory saying we are
not conscious
before then? That sounds crazy. We were, like, what? Robots? Zombies?”

“Not quite. The idea is that back in the time before written language, we were not individuals in the way we now understand the idea. Not self-aware.”

“I don’t see how there could be any evidence for that,” I said.

“That, Morag, is because you share the modern prejudice that all evidence is scientific evidence. The big source for the bicameral theory isn’t lab data—it’s ancient literature. We think we know what it’s like to be human, so we project what we’re like back onto these people who lived thousands of years ago. But when you read Egyptian theological writings, or Hittite funereal urns, or early Greek poetry—”

“Yah, sure,” Kit said. “Funeral urns especially. All the time.”

“—you meet human beings with an inner life that’s profoundly odd. They had only a primitive, half-formed sense of
self
. They didn’t even think of themselves as individuals, really, as beings with choices. They just listened for commands and obeyed them. Or tried not to and found it didn’t make any difference to the outcome. They called it
fate
.”

“They were hearing voices?”

“Perhaps. But the bicameral theory says the voices were really the dominant left hemisphere talking to the subservient right hemisphere. The gods were inside us.”

“Is good thing we don’t have to be slaves of voices in the head now.”

“Oh, but we are, Kit, we are. You think your
self
, the real you, is like the captain on the bridge of a ship, yes? Someone who sits in a big leather chair, three inches behind your eyes, watching and steering? But think of the internal struggles we all have, all the time. Laziness. Fear. Temptation. Why? Why these internal, deeply painful and emotional struggles? If we’re each only one person, ask yourself a simple question: Who’s doing the struggling? It takes two to wrestle. I say, Kit, could you pass me some more of that tea?”

He’d made her caretaker of his family-sized thermos, a quart or two of milky Assam stewed to the color of cheap leather. While I tried to digest the possibility that every single human being on the planet was schizophrenic, she poured a couple of inches into the plastic lid and passed it forward. He took both hands off the wheel and reached back to accept it, then blew across the top, holding it up to eye level and peering at the steam. As I was about to shout a warning, he put three fingertips back on the wheel, leaned forward, and slurped noisily. At that exact moment Brunhilde was hip-checked by a big gust of air as Ella’s truck blew past us, doing eighty. Ella gave us a smile and a finger wave as we shot two feet over the white line toward the barrier wall. Completely unperturbed, Partridge steered us back into the lane, raising his cup to return the greeting. A tsunami of tea crested over the lip of the cup and splashed onto his brown corduroy pants.

“Well, bugger,” he said cheerfully, looking down at the damage. “The only clean pair I’ve got too. I get clumsier and clumsier. Old age shouldn’t be allowed. I suppose that’s part of the Seraphim’s appeal, eh? The traditional faiths don’t like the body because it’s so distractingly beautiful when it’s young. The Seraphim don’t like the body because it gets old and breaks down. They both think the body gets in the way of immortality.”

He slurped the remains of the tea.

“But I wonder: Is
not
having a body such a good idea? The Architects are disembodied, but like the Greek gods, they keep interfering with us. Why? Why do they still need us so badly? Sorry, what were we talking about?”