Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  “More Anabasis, I assume. More Mysteries. And more power: they’re getting stronger, you see. They’re feeding, and—”

  But he stopped there and looked around, like an old dog smelling the wind, and then waved his hand dismissively. “Now that we’re together, Morag, in this beautiful place, let’s save for later any more of these cheerful speculations about humanity’s destruction. First things first: introduce me to your friends. And reintroduce me to Daniel—do you think he’ll know me?”

  “He doesn’t even know me. Or I don’t know that he does. He’s only lucid from time to time, and the lucid bits don’t always make a lot of sense either.”

  I walked him back to Ella’s truck, where the three of you stood watching. “Look who came to join us,” I said. “Rosko, this is—”

  “Herr Professor,” he said, all German and formal, putting out his hand. “Professor Partridge. Yes, I recognize you from your author photograph.”

  “Well well well, and you are Rosko Eisler. Der berühmte Bergsteiger!”

  “Climber, yes. Not famous yet.”

  “Aber es ist mir eine Ehre, Sie kennenzulernen,” Partridge replied, with a little bow. Such a charmer: An honor to meet you. It was flattery, but the real charm lay in the fact that he so obviously meant it.

  “Danke,” Rosko said. “Sie auch.”

  Partridge turned to Kit, and bowed slightly. “And you must be Natazscha Cerenkov’s daughter. Yekaterina, isn’t it?”

  “Kit,” she said, taking his hand. “Kit is easier. You recognize how?”

  “Daniel’s father once introduced me to your mother at a conference.”

  “I am looking like my mother?” She sounded horrified.

  “Oh, there is a slight family resemblance,” Partridge said delicately. “It must be your eyes.”

  “Good catch, Professor,” Ella said.

  It was kind of funny, I had to admit; I was glad to be turned toward her, so that Kit wouldn’t see me smiling. “And this is Ella Hardy,” I said. “Ella had the idea for the trip. You could say she’s our resident astronomer.”

  I assumed that a crusty old Brit in a tweed sport coat and an overpainted teen in a microskirt and combat boots would disapprove of each other on sight. Instead, it was like long-lost friends.

  “An astronomer? In that case, no doubt you have much to teach me. I see that’s a Dobsonian telescope you’re unpacking.”

  “Fifteen-inch f4.2.”

  “I’m going to make a wild guess that you’re a deep-sky fan. Galaxies? Planetary nebulae?”

  “The Cat’s Eye’s my favorite.”

  “Ah, yes! Dear old NGC 6543. Evidently we share the same refined aesthetic sensibilities! I shall look forward to the privilege of exploring the sky with you tonight. By the way, I do love those earrings.”

  I was about to introduce you last of all, but you’d stepped away from the truck to watch the dust trail as a convoy of other cars approached—your musician friend Julia Shubin, who had all the food, plus half a dozen others. You quietly absented yourself from those introductions too. It was only half an hour later that I managed to get the three of us—you, me, Partridge—away from the others. As the late afternoon light turned the fields from green to gold, we went for a long walk back along the farm road, Partridge propelling himself awkwardly but energetically with the help of a stick.

  “Daniel, it’s so good to see you again. Perhaps you won’t remember me, but we’ve met several times before. Your father was my star student.”

  I didn’t expect you to say anything. I was happy enough to see how clearly you were focused on him—how obviously you were listening. But you nodded, or perhaps I imagined you did, and you said your father’s name.

  “Bill Calder.”

  “Yes,” Partridge said. “Bill was a remarkable person, as both your parents were. I’m very sorry.”

  He had the right instincts with you—kind of the way Kit did. Instead of pressing you to say more, he just chatted, as if it was a normal conversation, reminiscing to you about your parents. Gradually he came around to Bill’s work on the Disks, and Iona’s search for an answer about the Mysteries, and the way those both connected up with his own research on Thera and the Bronze Age. You didn’t once take your eyes off him.

  “I suppose I’ve always been fascinated with the idea that we might be thoroughly wrong about everything,” he said. “That, with all our knowledge and our sophisticated theories, we might be missing something fundamental. And that seems to have become a bit more probable of late, what with one thing and another! You see, I think the Architects you met on Ararat were the same beings our ancestors worshipped at Thera. The same beings that Morag’s Shul-hura worshipped, and then developed some doubts about worshipping. And the record seems to show that they were powerful—but that someone fought back.”

  “Too much knowledge,” you said. “Babblers. Too many languages.”

  He looked at you for a long time, as if assessing something, and raked his hair into place with his mottled, lumpy old man’s hands. Then he turned to me. “You only managed to read part of the Geographika before you two dropped it into the Mediterranean, am I right?”

  “You’re not going to forget that, are you?”

  “No,” he said mildly. “But no use crying over spilled milk, as my mother used to say. The point is, I did read the part about some Therans ‘ascending’ and others ‘failing.’”

  “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 mas
s, 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.

  PART II:

  ZONE OF MIRACLES

  CHAPTER 8

  GOD’S MONSTERS

  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 = mc2’ 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.”