Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (30 page)

“Is cloud, Daniel,” Kit said. “Is just cloud.”

But Isbet shook her head. “Tolim eh,” she said.
He’s right.

“Not far now, then,” Jimmy said. He was talking to Lorna, trying to encourage her, ignoring the absurdity of this alleged volcano, five hundred miles west of where New Guinea’s active volcanoes were supposed to be. I could hear her wheezing. We continued, but a few steps later, just before a steep drop-off, you stopped and looked up, a hand held out.

“Rain.”

Kit wiped her face with a bandana and looked up at the uninterrupted blue sky. “No, Daniel, I don’t think so. Maybe later.” But I’d got used to assuming that whatever you said was either true or about to be true. We paused for thirty seconds, feeling the sweat trickle over us, feeling the heat of the air on the insides of our mouths, listening to the electric crackle of the insects. To one side, a small brown stream ran twenty feet below us.

Oma held his face and arms up in a dramatic gesture and muttered, waving a hand. “Trum kel omin,” Isbet said to me.
He wants us to hurry.
Oma began to pick his way down ahead of us. He was crouching, using his fingers and toes to feel his way across the fractured surface, like someone reading braille. Dog scampered back and forth between us, as if trying to help or make us move faster. Jimmy and Lorna had taken up a position right ahead of me. She must have put her foot on a loose stone: she slid sideways with a little
ai
of surprise.

“No!” Jimmy cried, and lunged at her. He caught her sleeve, but all that did was pull him off balance too. He spun, fell backward, and hit a finger of rock that ripped the pack from his shoulders. Both of them tumbled toward the stream.

Dog got to them first. Jimmy was lying faceup on the stream bank, motionless. Lorna, thigh deep in mud the color of baby poop, was swearing a blue streak while struggling to extricate herself and get to him. “Och, ye clumsy eejit, Lorna,” she was saying to herself. “Why can ye nae luik where yer puttin’ yer feck’n feet? Jimmy, are ye a’right? Talk to me, man.”

Jimmy was a’right, sort of. His shirt was ripped open, and he had rock rash all over his back; otherwise he was just badly winded. When he recovered, we discovered that Lorna was the bigger problem. She seemed fine, apart from ruined dignity and a grazed arm. But she cried out when we tried to lift her from the muck.

“Knee,” she said. “Right feck’n knee.”

I bathed away some of the mud and used a knife to cut open the leg of her trousers. There was no visible wound, but she couldn’t stand on it.

“Well, this’ll sure slow us down,” she said.

“It won’t slow us down,” Mayo said. He’d picked his way down much more slowly and only just arrived on the scene. “We can’t afford for it to slow us down. You’re not going to make it, so you’ll have to go back.”

“We’ll see about that,” she said. Translation:
Start givin’ me orders, ye great Aussie git, an’ I’ll break yer nose.

It felt odd to agree with Mayo, but he was right. “We don’t have much more light,” I said. “We’ll have to camp here. And your knee isn’t the only problem. Jimmy’s back is an infection waiting to happen.”

Lorna scowled at me. I unpacked the first-aid kit and threw you a tarp to put up. I was cleaning Jimmy’s back when you said “Rain” again. Seconds later it began to drizzle. Seconds after that, the drizzle turned into a violent, wind-blown torrent.

It was like having a swimming pool thrown at us. In minutes, my skin went from unpleasantly hot to unpleasantly cold. You followed the lead of Isbet and her father, simply squatting with your backs to a fallen log as if determined to remain motionless however long it lasted. Jimmy and I got a tarp strung up and moved everyone under it. Because nobody could bother to deal with the cooker, Kit and I produced a dinner consisting of chunks of cold Spam knifed onto crackers.

Just as we finished eating, the rain stopped, the wind died, and the mosquitoes showed up in black swarms, impatient for blood. Just as it became fully dark, they went away again—and the rain started again. Dog snuffled around the site—looking for potential dangers or potential leftovers, it was hard to be sure—then came over to lick Spam juice off my fingers. Then it curled up at my feet and immediately started to snore. A long night.

Cold all over. Damp all over. Numb legs and a shoulder aching from where Kit was resting her head on it. Gray light leaking like a pollutant into the blackness. And, out of the corner of my eye, behind the trees, something moving—or was I just imagining it? I had the sense, probably false, that I’d never slept. But I must have dozed off again after that, because I was woken up by the clank of a spoon against a pot, and a sound I’d never heard before: Oma and Isbet, close by, having an argument. At least Jimmy had the cooker working.

“Cold?” he said.

“Freezing.”

He handed me a mug of cocoa. I sipped it gratefully and considered pouring it over my head. Kit woke up and took it from me; I saw Jimmy smile.

“How is injuries?” she said.

“Fine.”

“Let me look,” I said.

“Morag, they’re fine. Don’t fuss.”

“Jimmy,” I imitated, “they’re probably not fine. And I’m not going to put up with you playing hero just so that you can die of blood poisoning. Show me.”

Scabs were forming, but his skin was already bright pink and hot to the touch. “Infected,” I said. “You’ll have to go back too.”

Lorna had woken up. “Jimmy, she’s right. Ye got ye’self a right nasty there.”

“What about you?” I asked her.

“Just comfy as can be, lyin’ here. But I canna walk much an’ that’s sure. We’ll all have to go back down.”

Mayo was watching from a log, the gun across his knees. “Morag and I will continue,” he said. “We’re close enough for me to find the way now. The rest of you can return with Oma and Isbet.”

“Forget it,” I said. “I came here for Daniel, not for you.”

“And I came here for both of them,” Kit said.

“Aye,” Lorna said, “an’ while we’re all joinin’ the party, let me jus’ say I’m no way lettin’ you bugger off up there in search of God-knows-what without me, Morag Chen.”

“You don’t have a choice,” I said. “You can’t go, and we have to. For Daniel’s sake.”

“I’iwa,” you said. “For everyone.”

“I can do it, Mumma. I’m not a child anymore.”

“Morag is safe,” you said to her, with total conviction.

“What about Isbet and Kit?” I asked you. But you shook your head. You seemed to be saying,
I don’t know; my knowledge doesn’t go there.

Isbet stepped between us.
It’s decided,
she said in Tain’iwa.
My father will lead your parents back. And I will stay.

Can he do it?
I asked.
Without you to guide him?

There was an expression in Tain’iwa for doing something the wrong way, or the most difficult way:
walking on your ears
. Isbet used it now:
Now that we’ve come here,
she said,
he could retrace our path back to the village if he had to walk on his ears.

“I stay with you,” Kit said.

After we’d eaten some rice—with hot sauce squirted on top and the customary sprinkle of bug parts—Jimmy handed me his broken pack. “The usual wilderness stuff. First aid, flashlight, road flares.”

“Road flares?”

“I persuaded an angry rhino to get lost with one of those. And there’s an avalanche beacon too.”

“Oh,
that’ll
be useful. So much loose snowpack around here.”

“It might be useful. Make sure you’re in the open, press the big red button for ten seconds, and it uploads your position to a satellite. You don’t have to be in an avalanche to need locating.”

“We won’t need locating,” I said. “We’ll be fine. Good luck.” You stepped forward and took the pack from me, slipping it on.

As they left, and we were about to lose sight of them in the trees, Lorna turned and looked at me. There wasn’t a hint of a smile. “When I spoke to ye on the phone, Morag Chen, I felt entitled to assume that our reunion would last a wee bit longer than thuss. And that it wouldn’t end wi’ ye disappearin’ into a stretch o’ unmarked jungle in search o’ somethin’ that makes the locals mess their undies. Forty-eight hours, gurrl. Not back by then, I’m tellin’ ye, we’re sendin’ in the cavalry.”

I didn’t want to make her worry more than she was already worrying, so I didn’t point out that there would be no cavalry. If anything happened to us in those mountains, and we didn’t return, they’d be stuck trying to persuade the other Tainu to come looking. I knew the Tainu. Even with Isbet missing, they wouldn’t help us. Oma’s dream had changed only his own mind; the rest of them were unsentimental about death and had clear views about their duties to the I’iwa. They’d just look at the ground, mutter about
isula
, which meant “fate,” and walk away.

When Jimmy, Lorna, and Oma had gone, Mayo smiled like a mechanic who’s just fixed a broken engine. “We’ll get along much quicker now,” he said. The weather was good again, the terrain easier. And we walked side by side for a while—a fact I managed to use, despite all my anger and instinctive dislike, to get him to answer my most urgent question.

I fell into a whisper; he’d already made it clear that he had a mad idea of us working together, so I thought some conspiratorial info-swapping would appeal to his vanity. Got him to talk about himself. Asked what he thought of this or that issue in cognitive science, gave him an edited version of my conversations with Balakrishnan. I mentioned Iona’s name a couple of times too, just to soften him up, then brought up her “thesis” again. As I spoke, I focused my mind on the image of you drawing in the soil that curved line connecting “√1” and “√2”. As if I could will him into saying something.

“I was proud of what Balakrishnan and I were attempting,” he said. “At least initially, back when I still thought uploading a mind was more or less a problem of having a big-enough thumb drive. I thought Julius Quinn was just a new-edition holy roller. A second Moses, as Iona said, bringing the Big Message down from the mountain. Easy to make fun of, and I was mildly amused to see that he was, in his confused, religious-mystical way, right about so much! ‘Our biology isn’t our nature,’ he said. Bingo that! ‘At the highest level,’ he said, ‘our biology is a barrier to our nature, because matter is evolving into mind.’ Bingo again! I congratulated myself on how much further my understanding had evolved that his.”

“But Iona changed that.”

“I was making no progress with Route Two. I kept telling Balakrishnan that we only needed a bigger computer, and more money, and a few more years, but privately I’d come to the conclusion that the existing ISOC setup was never going to work. There was something fundamental missing. To capture consciousness in any meaningful way—to liberate consciousness from its prison in the skull, as Quinn might have said—was going to require a technology far more advanced than anything we had. And Iona was the one who made me see two things: how I might find that technology and why it might be curtains for everyone if I failed. You see, her idea was that the Architects weren’t necessarily the crazy invention of a half-crazy charismatic and weren’t impossible, but that on the contrary, they might be—from a strictly scientific view—
inevitable
.”

“And that made your work for ISOC irrelevant? How?”

“She asked a simple question about Route Two. ‘OK, David,’ she said, ‘suppose we buy the whole idea. Suppose some kind of digital immortality really is possible. Maybe it requires better computers than we have, or better mathematics, or something else we’ve not even thought of yet, but it’s almost within reach. Next decade, next century, however long it’s going to take, it’s out there.’ And of course I said, ‘It is out there, Iona, I know it is.’ ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘So what I don’t understand is this. Why assume that we—twenty-first century
Homo sapiens
, an ape living on the third rock out from an average star in an average galaxy in the least fashionable suburbs of the Virgo Supercluster—are the first life in the universe to reach that point? Wouldn’t someone out there, or something out there, have learned how to do it first?’ And I said, ‘What if they had?’ ‘David,’ she said, ‘what would the universe look like to us if that were true? How would the universe be if an alien species had already beaten us to the finishing tape and already freed their consciousness from their biology?’”

He stopped and looked at me, as if to see whether I’d got it. Oh, I’d got it, and I was stunned by the simplicity of it.

“If Route Two is possible,” I said, “if technological immortality through mind uploading is possible, the best evidence that it’s possible won’t lie in our existing technology. It’ll lie in the existence of the sort of beings who caused us to spend the last five thousand years believing in Route One. So Route One is the best evidence we have that Route Two has already happened. And the Seraphim are worshipping beings who really are immaterial, really are immortal—and were once
creatures
,
just like us.”