Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (21 page)

“Hello,” the girl said, turning to me and bowing slightly. “Let me permit me to introduce you to yourself. You are the famous Morag Chen.”

I decided not to react to
famous
. Maybe it was a joke. There was something grown-up about her manner—or something calculated to make fun of grown-ups. “I’m Morag,” I said. “Yes.” And, going along with the game: “I’m very pleased to meet me.”

“This is my brother, Sunil.”

“Nice to meet you too, Sunil,” I said to the boy. “How does your sister know so much about me?”

“Because you’re famous,” he said. “She already told you that. Also because you’re expected. Uncle Akshay told us how excited he was to meet you at last. The three most important facts about you are that you’re a Babbler, like us, that you translated the tablets your parents found at Babylon, which says the Architects lied to us, and that you want to cure your brother.”

“Your brother, Daniel, who became a Mystery,” the girl continued, as if completing the same sentence. “Which means he probably won’t be cured and will die soon. Because that’s what Mysteries do.”

“My brother isn’t a Mystery,” I said, sounding more defensive than I’d intended, “and he’s not going to die.”

I half-expected her to challenge me, but she continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “Uncle Akshay wants to help you. But you’d better hurry. He’s very sick, and they can’t cure him, so he’s going to die soon too.”

She spoke of it flatly, with the special indifference about death that only children can manage. Sunil continued brightly: “Oh well. No one can live forever. Everyone has to die eventually! Unless they become Seraphim of course. Seraphim live forever!”

“Do you think so?”

“No,” the girl said. “He’s joking.”

As if to underline that, he grinned wickedly and spoke in a mocking singsong, like a kid might say “na-na, na-na, boo-boo”:
“Em-DA-chol. Ul-KO-vok. Ret-YEM-an. Ar-QA-het!”
It was a quotation from Quinn’s
Anabasis
—minus the usual reverence.

“I’ll take that for a no,” I said.

“Actually we’re not sure what we think.” Her eyes sparkled. “But we
think
that what we think is what we
think
you think.”

“Or,” Sunil added, “we think we think what Uncle Akshay says he thinks you think.”

“O-kay,” I said. “Before I get lost, tell me, what is it that Uncle Akshay thinks I think?”

The girl took over again, speaking rapidly. “He thinks you think the Architects enslaved us thousands of years ago. He thinks you think they needed the Babblers but couldn’t control them.”

“I’m fascinated by all these ideas of mine,” I said. “Tell me, what do I think the Babblers did back then?”

“You think they became the priests, at first. The translators of what the Architects wanted us to do.”

“Messengers of the gods, then.”

“Yes. Leading people to the Architects. Telling them that obedience meant eternal life and disobedience meant death. But the Babblers were a paradox.”

She said
paradox
slowly, importantly, obviously proud of using it. “Why a paradox?” I asked.

“Because the skills that made the Babblers good at persuading other people were also the skills that made some of them doubt what they were saying to the people. And made them safer from the Architects themselves.”

“Wow,” I said, trying to keep the tone light. “That’s right. You seem to know everything about me!”

“That’s not true,” Sunil said. “We don’t know what you had for breakfast this morning.”

“Toast with butter and marmalade. The very best Scottish marmalade, imported from Dundee, with big chunks of peel in it. Americans don’t really understand marmalade. But it was wasted. I burned the toast. I was distracted.”

“I do know one other thing about you,” Sunil said. “I know you’re still wondering what my sister’s name is.”

“You’re right, I am. Without knowing her name, how can I introduce her to herself?”

“Her name is Vandana,” he said. And they both chanted at once, “Vandana Vandana Vandana!”

“I see. Sunil and his sister Vandana Vandana Vandana. I’m sorry I interrupted your game.”

“It’s not a game,” the girl said, and made a wriggling movement, as if shaking off a bug. Sunil giggled, and said, “Tamjen-ékul-ókamem.”

“It’s a language,” she said. “That’s what we do, you know. Invent languages.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We’re Babblers, like you. But most Babblers only learn foreign languages. We invented one of our own when we were still babies. It’s called Ildavan. That’s what we speak most of the time. Since then we’ve invented five more.”

“The other ones are Ilnu, Andu, Andanil, Vasadin, and Slaa,” the boy said proudly. “Their names are all made up from our names. The more we speak, the more invincible we are! The one we were using just now is Slaa. Every sentence in Slaa is a single word.”

“Brilliant,” I said, convinced that they were having a joke at my expense. “Can you say something to me in Ildavan? I’ll give you a test, if you like.”

“Yes please!” Sunil said. “We love tests!”

I went over to Vandana and spoke with my hand cupped to her ear. She nodded, frowned, and then stood still, like a nervous primary school kid about to give a presentation to her class. I stepped back and waited, feeling the sun on my face and the smell of the sea. The house stood behind me—blue gray, featureless, the essence of ordinary—and I wondered whether I was supposed to just walk in. Someone moved in a downstairs room, and I had the sense I was being watched.

Vandana still hadn’t said anything. She wrinkled her nose, squinted, and adjusted her hair. Her brother was looking straight at her with his eyes narrowed, all concentration. She looked up at the sky, then at me, then at the ground. She twisted her fingers together fiercely, as if desperately trying to wash something invisible from her hands, and moaned, and her whole body seemed to vibrate and shiver with tension. It was like witnessing intense embarrassment, but the twitching motions and the noises suggested Tourette’s. When she stopped, she stood awkwardly, with one foot held sideways, biting her lip.

“Well,” I said, trying to be sympathetic, “I’m not understanding much Ildavan so far. But that’s all right. Maybe later.”

“You’re not understanding it,” Sunil said, “because you don’t know it.”

“What I mean is, Vandana didn’t say anything yet.”

He rolled his eyes at me with the frank rudeness only children can get away with—the expression said, roughly,
I didn’t expect you to be such a moron.
Then he repeated what I’d said privately to his sister, complete with a merciless, over-the-top parody of my accent: “What you said to her was ‘Tell yer brothah ah flew all the weh from Seatt-ul jess tuh see Mustur Bulu-krush-nun. And thut the vulue of pai es apprawk-su-mutleh three point one fower one faive naine.’”

Vandana put a hand to her face and snorted with delight. I was about to ask how they’d done it. But a tiny gray-haired Indian woman had come out onto the front step and was waiting.

Fifty? Sixty? Seventy? I couldn’t tell. Her sari was a rich green silk threaded with gold, as if the silkworms had been raised on a diet of pure money. She didn’t smile or give the impression that she’d ever had much practice smiling.

“Ah, Miss Chen, yes,” she said, looking me up and down. “Welcome.” There was more regret than welcome in her voice, as if she wanted to convey simultaneously the idea that my appearance disappointed her and that she was too well-bred to say so. And I detected a hint of condescension in
Miss
, or I thought I did—almost as if she’d called me
child
.

“You must be Mrs. Chaudry.”

She rolled her head to one side, then the other, a very Indian gesture I’d seen before. It might have meant
Perhaps
, or
Yes
, or
Follow me and don’t waste my time with chitchat.
On the front step, I turned back to say good-bye to the children, but they were engrossed in their language “game.”

As we stepped inside, I glimpsed a younger woman in a nurse’s uniform through an interior doorway. Mrs. Chaudry took me down a short corridor to an elevator.

“This way please. Mr. Balakrishnan is waiting for you on the lanai.”

“Don’t you mean Mr. Smith?” I was trying to get a rise out of her, without success.

“Mr. Balakrishnan is very frail. He insists on seeing you, but he will not be able to talk for long.”

It meant
I will not permit you to talk for long.

“What does he—?”

“No doubt he will explain everything.”

One floor up, when the door slid open, she made no move to get out. “Please go. This is where Mr. Balakrishnan works. As I said, you will find him out on the lanai, through the door to your right.”

It may have been an ordinary house, but I was standing in a surprisingly grand space, a study or gallery that took up the entire floor. Cello music that I couldn’t identify—Bach?—was flooding in, loud, from invisible speakers. A half wall with a teak bookcase partially blocked the view down the room, but I could see that the far end was dominated by a huge desk, and an arrangement of soft chairs in pale leather around a fireplace. Although it was a summer afternoon in the tropics, small blue-and-yellow flames were blooming there like crocuses.

Above the desk there was a large, colorful abstract painting. Some hunch or other told me it was by someone famous, and not a reproduction, and therefore worth a million dollars per square foot. But the biggest, most striking piece of art in the room was definitely a reproduction. The original wouldn’t have fit in the house—and the Louvre wouldn’t have let it go, not even for Balakrishnan’s money.

An old friend, you might say. Do you remember, D? No, of course you don’t remember being in Paris with us in January. You probably don’t even remember the fog, or the ice-bound fountains, or having bowls of hot chocolate in Montmartre, with those pastries called
cravates
that you always chose because they were the biggest. I don’t suppose you remember being taken to the Louvre by Lorna either, but we saw this with her. We stood together, you and I, staring up at the five-meter original, while she told us the story.

“Look at the big bad laddie wi’ the stone beard, boys an’ girls. Gilgamesh! His mother was human, but his da’ was a demon, a
lilu
, an’ that means the wee bairn was a demigod. Aye, yet another one, Morag, like the kings o’ Java, an’ the Chinese emperors, an’ Zeus’s whole family o’ brats an’ troublemakers. Not to mention Jesus, o’ course, an’ enough characters in Hinduism to fill a bloody football stadium.
Hemitheos
, that’s the Latin. Half god. Like superheroes, isn’t it, special powers an’ all. And the idea’s been all over human civilization like a rash since, oh, a very long time before anyone thought o’ Superman. Gorgeous muscles, don’t you think? Gilgamesh was one o’ the first. He’s special for another reason too. The Sumerians kept very good records—bunch o’ bureaucrats, frankly. According to their official list, he reigned as king in the Sumerian city o’ Uruk for 126 years. Not a bad innings, ye’d think. But he wasn’t satisfied wi’ that. Och no. He was right miffed about not bein’ a true immortal, see? He wanted the whole package. To be a god. To never, ever die.”

It’s epic, the statue, but comical too: the great hero’s arm is clamped casually around the neck of a lion, and the lion hangs helpless against his thigh, struggling feebly on its last breath—it has all the scale, power, and dignity of a rabbit.
An interesting choice of decor,
I thought,
for Balakrishnan.
And that was before I’d met him.

When I stepped between Gilgamesh and the bookcase, I could see the whole room for the first time. Down one wall there were big picture windows with a view of Mauna Loa—though the mountain’s so gently sloped that it looked like a low, distant ridge. On the other wall, opposite the windows, a sliding glass door, partly open, led out to a lanai. To the left of the door there was a big glass-fronted cabinet.

The cabinet held four rows of small round objects, above a large mechanical device that glittered and moved. I knew at once what the round objects were. I’d never seen the mechanical device before, but I knew what that was too.

C
HAPTER
14

I
MMORTALITY
M
AN

I stood just a few feet from the door onto the lanai. There was a sliver of a view over low rooftops toward the ocean. Part of a wheelchair was visible, and a bony hand on the armrest.

Silence.

I walked softly to the door. The lanai was five or six feet deep and maybe twelve feet long with a metal railing. At one end there were two cloth-covered outdoor chairs and a glass-topped table; at the other end, in the wheelchair, a man was sleeping under a heavy tartan blanket. Only his face and the hand were visible. The wheelchair, the awkward angle of the head, the sunken features—it was like that last picture of Hawking. I’ve seen photos of Charlie B. Who hasn’t? But it was difficult to connect this shrunken figure to the global dealmaker in ten-thousand-dollar suits. He was so still, he could have been dead already, until a fly buzzed his face and he shifted slightly.

Mr. Balakrish—

I didn’t say it. His name was on the tip of my tongue, but I changed my mind and went back to the glass display case. It was eight feet high, ten feet long, and two deep. The top half held all thirty-four of the Phaistos Disks in four rows: eight along the top, then nine, then eight, then nine again—the pattern reminded me of the alternating rows of stars on the American flag. The lower half was taken up by a moving, glittering network of cylinders, dials, gears, and levers; they looked like the inner guts of a monstrous clock in a Victorian inventor’s dream. Some of the parts were silvery metal. Some were made from clear plastic, so that you could see the parts behind.

Several hundred gear wheels—but it took my eyes only a moment to pick through all that dense mechanical choreography and find the bit you and I both knew so well. The thing that had wowed the archaeologists and historians—
an analog computer a thousand years ahead of its time
, according to Derek P—was tucked into a corner near the front, and it was revealed here, in this grand reconstruction, as nothing more than a minor servomechanism. The much larger machine into which it fit, the real Antikythera Mechanism, also had the delicate intricacy of an old chronometer, but the size of it reminded me of farm machinery.

Obvious: the divers who’d attacked you in Crete—working for Mayo?—had found the whole thing. Or found enough of it to reconstruct the whole thing. And Balakrishnan had worked out that it wasn’t just a calendar device or an eclipse predictor but a computer designed to decode the Disks. You could see the symbols etched on some of the wheels, dozens of them legible and dozens more eroded into enigma by time.

Click, click, click: it was going through the combinations. Or trying to. When I’d asked Rosko about the numbers involved, he’d said, “The cable lock on my bike has four digits, with ten numerals each. That’s ten thousand possible combinations. Imagine a lock with as many possible combinations as—uh—look, there are 10
⁸⁰
protons in the observable universe. One followed by eighty zeroes. If every single one of those protons was a universe in itself, there’d be 10
¹⁶⁰
protons in all those universes. With me so far?”

“Sure, Rosko. Every proton in the universe is a universe. No problem.”

“OK. Well, more than that.”

The desk by the fireplace was made from a dark exotic hardwood, inlaid in an abstract pattern with other exotic hardwoods, but other than that it was a lot like Mayo’s desk at ISOC. It looked barely used, and there was nothing on it except a single folder under a paperweight. The folder was dark red and had “BalakInd Corporation” in gold letters on the cover.

I should have gone straight out to the lanai, but I couldn’t resist sitting in the chair and running my hands over the polished surface. It was like a metaphor of my own ignorance. What did I know about Balakrishnan? About as much as I knew about Mayo. Almost nothing.

One of the drawers had been left open; my hands were picking through its contents before I’d even thought about it. Pens and mints. More folders. Thick, creamy, old-fashioned personal writing paper, with nothing but “A. Balakrishnan” at the top of each sheet. More mints.

The fire was right at my back, and I started to sweat as I took out one of the folders. There was nothing in it but spreadsheets filled with big-money numbers. My phone buzzed in my pocket. I reached to turn it off, then saw it was Kit. The sound was off, so all I got was her face, her lips silently moving, her eyes unsmiling. Her expression had the unmistakable look of—

OK, so on second thoughts it wasn’t unmistakable. A whole ragbag of different interpretations sprang into my mind and started throwing punches at each other. Stressed out by Rosko? Mildly fed up because she burned the lunch again? Generally bored due to still being stuck in the cabin? Anxious about your mental state? Anxious about my safety and/or mental state? Conflicted and guilt-ridden because she was unsure how to communicate while temporarily withholding from me (with, oh, the best possible motives!) the information that she’s decided this relationship might be, let’s face it, shall we, Morag, a huge mistake?

No idea.

Too many ideas.

My thumb fluttered over the sound icon, but it wasn’t the best moment. Besides, if I did contact her, I might have a hard time finding the sweet spot between sounding not-quite-believably casual—
Aye, the flight was no problem. Everything’s fine. How are you guys doing?
—and sounding not-quite-bearably needy:

I love you. Missing you is like being stabbed in the heart over and over with a rusty screwdriver. I can’t bear to be without you, and it absolutely pisses me off that I don’t have the strength of mind to stop thinking about you even when I need to stop thinking about you. Seeing your face makes it better. And worse. At the same time. I feel like an addict, and it turns out that addiction is a total blast (brilliant insight here: that must be why addiction is so, you know, addictive!—never thought of that before). A total blast, right up to the moment when someone takes the goodies away and you go into withdrawal and discover that withdrawal is a creature straight out of the pit of hell, and, when it gets its claws into you, you’d rather die than breathe. Which is how I feel now, and oh, by the way, on top of all that or beneath all that or mixed right in with it, there’s thinking about Daniel and what if I fail and—

Luckily, all that took only a fraction of a second in real time. And it was interrupted soon enough by Sensible Morag:

Stop it. You’re pathetic. Just do yourself a favor and stop it right now. Switch off the emotions, and shut up, and concentrate.

I took one more second to look at her face. OK, five. Then I tore my eyes away and switched off the screen. But I still had the phone in one hand and the BalakInd folder in the other when Sunil’s voice floated up from the garden, high and lilting and insistent: “Ok-díjen-yat-éjen. Dor-bi-mílok. Omdalu-kájanit.”

His sister responded in a slow drawl. I couldn’t understand a word—“Oón-ováy-ara-jékdikar”—but it was perfectly clear that she was asserting her big-sister superiority by dismissing whatever it was he’d just said.

Balakrishnan must have woken up and heard them too, because the next voice was his, calling down to them. An unsteady voice. An old voice: “Sunil-énembit? Gárakom?”

Sunil again: “Akshaylam-íngeteth? Lam-gójemek!”

I fumbled the phone and dropped it on the desk—during a pause in the music, of course. It clattered on the wood, dropped to the floor, and exploded noisily into three pieces. Phone, cover, battery. Angry with my own incompetence, I failed to suppress the instinct to say “Fuck” really loudly. As I scooped up the debris and stuffed it back into a pocket, I heard the scrape of a chair or table from outside.

“Ms. Chen, is that you at last? This way! This way! I’m out here in the sunshine, warming my brittle bones. So glad you could come.”

Gled
: a hint of upper-crust British. I wondered when the Ahmedabad slum boy had taken time out from business to fake that up.

“Right here,” I said brightly. “Just arrived.” I crossed half the space between desk and door, but I’d left the drawer open. In two strides I was back behind the desk. Something made me pick up the paperweight. The folder underneath was the same as the ones in the drawer—except for the additional notation in black marker pen:
DMJ
.

I was still standing behind the desk, with the paperweight in one hand and my fingers around the folder, when I heard Balakrishnan’s voice again.

“Ah. It looks as if you found what you’re looking for.”

I had the impression that, out of old-fashioned habit, he’d forced himself to get up. He’d slid the door open so quietly that I never heard it, and with the help of a rubber-tipped walking stick, he was propped in the opening. His hair was still dark and thick, with a smudge of gray at the temples, but his skin had gone gray too, his eyes bulged, and his neck was too thin for his shirt—over which, despite the temperature, he wore a blue V-necked sweater. I thought of Derek Partridge. But the two men weren’t just ethnically different. Derek was an old man driven by a high-voltage current. Charlie Balakrishnan was a decade younger, at least, but Sunil’s casually brutal assessment was right. “Uncle Akshay” was very, very sick.

“I hoped you might be captivated by this,” he said, gesturing with his eyes toward the mechanism in the cabinet. “But I see you’ve found something more interesting.”

I put the paperweight down. “If you hoped we could use this to re-create the language of the Architects, you’re out of luck,” I said. I told him about our work at the cabin. “Rosko thinks the Disks represent a trapdoor function—a mathematical problem even our best modern computers will gag on.”

“Beautiful, though, isn’t it?” he said mildly, putting a hand against the glass cabinet. “And I have a sentimental attachment to the idea that this was designed by Archimedes of Syracuse himself, and since he may have had the highest IQ of anyone in history, I’d wager that he knew what he was up against. Still, Rosko’s pessimistic assessment may be right: not enough firepower then, and perhaps not enough even now. Let’s sit outside. Bring that file with you.”

It was still in my hand. “I’m sorry,” I said, as I followed him out into the sunshine. “I shouldn’t have looked at it. I shouldn’t have been in here. It’s just that I need answers. And I—”

“No apology necessary, Ms. Chen. You need answers, because you want to save your brother—”

“How did you—?”

“You forget that Natazscha Cerenkov is my employee. You need answers because your brother’s mind has been stolen from you by strange forces that you don’t understand; you want to understand those forces so that you can bring him back, and you think I might be able to help. Which perhaps I can, and that indeed is why I asked you to come all this way. But of course you don’t know whether to trust me.”

With painful slowness, and my hand steadying one elbow, he eased himself back into the wheelchair. I put the folder down on the table next to him. Bluntness seemed like the best strategy. “You’re right. I don’t know whether to trust you. If I did, I wouldn’t be behaving like a house thief.”

I stood with my back against the railing. He steepled his fingers and looked up at me. His eyes were amazing: haunted by sickness, but at the same time sparkling, friendly, mischievous.

“As Socrates observes, knowing how ignorant you are is the first step toward wisdom. So. If you don’t have reason to trust me, don’t. I hired Maynard Jones, and I certainly thought I could trust him. Apparently not. We all make mistakes.”

“Maybe that’s a good place to start,” I said. “He took the Disks from Crete, right? He must have been watching Bill Calder for a long time, waiting for an opportunity to pounce. But one of the last things Bill said before he died was that Mayo had sent the Antikythera Disks to you in India.”

“I’ve always been a magpie,” he said apologetically. “Easily distracted by shiny things. At my house in Delhi I have superb collections of everything from Renaissance maps to Japanese art deco movie posters. But undeciphered texts are my real passion. I own the Dorabella cipher, the Rohonc Codex, and whole rooms full of writing in Olmec, Rongorongo, and the Indus Valley script. And one of my most prized possessions is the Voynich Manuscript, for which I paid Yale University a positively absurd sum. I don’t regret a penny of it.”

He stopped to breathe, aware that he still hadn’t answered me.

“The thing is, I had the Disks diverted here because, at the point when they came under my control, I’d just found out that I would be stuck in Hawaii for some time.”

“Stuck in Hawaii? That’s an odd thing to say.”

“I have not been taking surfing lessons, I assure you. I’ve spent most of the time deeply unconscious in an oxygen tent at a clinic I set up in Honolulu. Please take a seat; you’re making me feel impolite. And let’s have some tea, shall we?”

Let’s have some tea.
It was like God saying “Let there be light”: the instant he said the words, Mrs. Chaudry emerged onto the balcony with a wheeled silver trolley. On it there was a carved wooden tray that looked Indian, a fancy tea service in blue china that looked English, and a plate of tiny white sandwiches that looked as if they’d been cut with a laser.

Mrs. Chaudry poured silently for both of us, threw me another disapproving look, and left. “You met Sunil and Vandana?” he asked when she’d gone. “Her grandchildren. Very interesting. The only case we know of in which both parents are Babblers too.”

When he picked up the delicate china cup, the sun shone right through it onto the tea. I took a sip of mine: it was scented with cardamom.

“I am honored to meet you at last, Morag Chen,” he said. “Your reputation precedes you, of course, along with the Akkadian translations. Outstanding. But the reason I wanted to meet you is not to shower praise on a fellow Babbler or quiz you about the relevance of Shul-hura’s ‘alternative Babel’ to our current situation. My purpose, rather, is to acknowledge that you and I are facing the same puzzle. The difference being that I have been busy trying to save myself, while your concern is for someone else.”