Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) Page 15

  “Dze-OK—Dze-OK—” you said, as if greeting them.

  “Daniel, what are you—?”

  “Dze-OK-ma. Ok—Ok-ZU-qe. N’d—”

  “D, come on. Let’s go.”

  “Dz e-OK-ma. Ok-ZU-qe. N’d-UL-gor. Da-NOM-hut. Kul-MIN-ya. Ek-EP-su. Ep-GE-ret.”

  They were fascinated. Enchanted. But also torn between the desire to pursue you, to find out who you were, and the desire not to be distracted from the ruin of the library. Rosko grabbed you by the shoulder and started to pull you away. Two of them came forward, their arms out; it could have been a greeting or a threat.

  “We make a run for it?” Rosko muttered.

  “No,” Natazscha said. “That’ll only draw attention to us. To Daniel.”

  “Dze-OK-ma. Ok-ZU-qe. N’d-UL-gor. Da-NOM-hut—”

  I looked up. Someone was flicking on the main lights on ISOC’s second floor. Luckily it distracted the Seraphim as well: they looked up, then turned to their comrades as if to get advice. Rosko and I took you by the arms, and we walked away quickly, back up the slope in the direction of Natazscha’s car. When I risked a glance back, the whole group of Seraphim were looking at us and pointing.

  I reached for your hand and squeezed—for my comfort, not yours.

  “We’re getting you two out of here,” Rosko said.

  “But the Disks—” I pleaded.

  “We’ll get everything,” he said, “and go somewhere nice and quiet, where you and Daniel can rest.”

  “I don’t want to rest. I don’t have time to—”

  “Majka,” Kit said. “Majka. We’ll go get the files. Rosko is right. Get out of here is better. Daniel rests, I look after, you work on Disks. OK?”

  PART III:

  AN ALTERNATIVE TO GOD

  CHAPTER 11

  ROAMING

  It was a good idea, in theory: a few days away from accidental Seraphim encounters, and Seraphim marches, and burning libraries, and the sheer horror of discovering Carl Bates. I hadn’t wanted to leave the city, but Rosko and Kit ganged up with Natazscha: it would be good for me; it would be better still for you. When we’d all had not-enough sleep, and met the next morning in Natazscha’s postage-stamp kitchen, even Derek Partridge joined the cheerleading team. Wouldn’t it be good for Rosko and I to have peace and quiet! Really put our heads together on this big, urgent puzzle! He said “urgent” at least three times. It was kind of obvious he wanted to come too.

  In retrospect, I was swayed by the fact that I was carrying around in my head such a clear picture of what the words oceanfront cabin in the Pacific Northwest were supposed to mean. The picture was brightly lit and squeaky perfect. It had Scandinavian armchairs in primary colors, a wood-burning stove, and someone else’s collection of beach glass arranged prettily on the window ledge in the hypermodern kitchen. I only had to squint a little to get sunny weather too, and piles of books on a pale maple floor, and you—the old, pre-Ararat you—pulling fresh bread out of the oven while Kit and I lounged and cuddled in one of those armchairs.

  Oh well.

  “A poky little cabin belonging to some friends of my parents,” that was what Rosko had said; I should have listened harder to “poky,” and maybe done more of a Sherlock when I saw the rust-stained key on its length of frayed string. A Realtor would have called it “ripe for renewal,” or “filled with possibility”; an honest one would have said it was a scab on the skin of the land, a teardown, fit only for scraping off with a bulldozer and, as they say in the burial service, committing to the deep. On second thoughts, it looked like it had been coughed up by the deep: marooned on a sand-blasted bluff above the Strait of Juan de Fuca, it could have been the weathered wreck of a boat, washed in on the last storm surge along with the inevitable plus-sized driftwood, Japanese fishing floats, and seal carcasses picked eyeless by the gulls. The exterior cedar planks were like muddy fur. The front door was stuck shut—and, as if mocking us, wouldn’t shut again without a struggle once it was open. The kitchen had mold, mouse droppings, and dishes still in the sink from the last user. There was lethal-looking wiring leading from a rooftop solar panel to a stack of car batteries, which ran half a dozen forty-watt light bulbs, two electric baseboard heaters, and a dorm fridge that wheezed and stank like a dying cat. There was no Internet and no landline, and the cell reception was terrible to nonexistent. At the back, the “sun shower” was a stone-cold outdoor dribble coming from a plastic barrel, with privacy-lite on two sides thanks to some blackberry bushes; on the north side, you got to show off everything you had to the whales, the wind, and the binoculars of passing tanker captains.

  And it wasn’t just in the shower that you felt unprotected. That big, muscular arm of the North Pacific frightened me even when I was safe inside. Too much water. Should have thought of that.

  As soon as we’d arrived and wrestled our way inside, I hated it. I suspected you’d hate it more. But I was so ready to tackle Bill’s old problem at last—the secret of the Disks—that I ignored you all that first day, trusting that the others would do their magic and look after you. I knew I’d have to get Rosko helping me soon enough, but we couldn’t run software on the images without a lot of plain looking and list-making, so I worked furiously on that. I had to get an accurate count of the symbols and the way they were grouped: pure manual tedium, but I didn’t mind; when I was done, we could feed the digitized essence of Theran civilization into the software Bill had written for the purpose. I worked hard, long into the evening, willing those ancient symbols to cough up the nugget of meaning that Bill had always wanted to find in them. And I didn’t have to feel too guilty; even Kit and Rosko didn’t have to do much to entertain you. You were like me, I suppose: too intent on Iona’s photographs to notice the cabin much, or notice us.

  By the next morning I had some preliminary data counts. With nothing but PB&Js and about three pots of Stefan’s Expensively Organic, Small-Batch, Shade-Massaged French Roast to sustain us, Rosko and I attacked the problem together. While I checked my lists and sat hunched over the sixty-eight glossy prints, trying to see if I’d missed anything, he tweaked the software.

  “It can translate, you hope?” Kit asked.

  “I wish,” I said. “All this can do is sniff out the underlying structure of the language. It’s designed to look for clues the way any linguist would. Where are the word breaks? What are the short words and how do they repeat? Are there prefixes and suffixes? Are there any proper names?”

  “That was crucial when Champollion worked out the Rosetta stone,” Rosko said.

  “And if it works like you hope?”

  “Then, in theory, Morag can work out how to translate it.”

  He didn’t sound enthusiastic or hopeful. “Then I’ll translate it,” I said, “and we’ll know what the Architects said—and maybe even know what the Babbler priests like Shul-hura did to escape their influence.”

  You’d been Bill’s sidekick on the project since the age of ten, and I hoped you’d be as excited as me about what we were doing. Instead you were irritable from the start. You kept getting up, sitting down, biting your nails, looking out the window. I sensed that you didn’t even want to be in the room with us. Your irritation irritated me, at the beginning, and then it began to alarm me. You began to tense and relax like someone with cramps; you made low, guttural sounds that sounded like “no” or “you can’t.” Your cheeks were hollow; the way you looked at me was hollow; again I had the sense that you were trying to communicate with me from inside a locked box.

  For several hours I managed to distract and calm you by getting you to help. “Count these,” I said, pointing to a particular symbol. “I need the total number of repetitions on these six sheets.” I wasn’t expecting that you could do it, but you did. A cliché from the autism spectrum: a repetitive, logical task was something you could become absorbed in and do accurately. And fast.

  “Fifty-three.”

  “Good. That’s what I got. Now I want you to count how many instance
s of the walking woman?”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “Fabulous. You’re going to be a big help.”

  You weren’t, though, not much. We went on like that through another dozen or more symbols, but it was annoying you, as if you were being forced to perform a trick and you weren’t interested. Eventually you sighed, bit your knuckles like you were trying to prevent yourself from crying, and walked out of the room.

  There was a long, long way to go at that point. I checked on you briefly—slumped into an armchair in the living room; staring vacantly into the middle distance—and dug into the task at double speed.

  I was wired, frantic, poised between an almost romantic elation and an ominous sense of defeat. I couldn’t know what the software would tell us, if anything, but my mind whirred with the possibilities, with what a thrill it would be if some pattern magically emerged telling me, I don’t know, that all the groups with the stick symbol in last place were nouns. Or something. It would be the light at the end of the tunnel. Bill had spent the last seven years of his life trying to translate those Disks. “I feel like a child outside a locked candy store,” he’d said to me. “I feel the way Kober and Ventris must have felt, spending decades hammering on the door of Linear B, knowing there was a whole civilization in there.”

  As I finished sections of the visual count, Rosko transcribed them to a digital key and sounded a note of skepticism as he loaded that into the software. “Tell me again how this is going to work,” he said, between flurries of typing. “According to Bill, this was just an ancient language. According to you, it’s the language of the Architects, the language they gave to the Therans—”

  “Or imposed on them.”

  “Or imposed, sure. So if we can read the Disks, it’ll be like, what? Discovering the Ten Commandments?”

  “What the Architects said is something we won’t know until we know, Rosko.”

  “So how do we know it will help?”

  I didn’t have an answer, only hope. “Just run the software, will you?”

  “Getting there. I need five more minutes. And more coffee.”

  When I got the pot from the kitchen, I noticed that it was already evening. I turned on some lights, poured the muddy dregs into his mug, handed Rosko his coffee, and sat next to you on the floor, holding your unresponsive hand, as five minutes turned into an hour. Rosko loaded data and steered Bill’s program through a series of trial runs, validation tests, and adjustments, all the while muttering “Scheisse” and “das könnte klappen” and then “Scheisse” again under his breath. Screen after screen filled with data, which resolved into colored patterns. More data, more adjustments, more patterns. It was like Bill himself was a presence inside the machine, sorting, hunting, comparing, and combining.

  “How long?”

  “This is just the chew-and-swallow phase,” he said. “If we had the ISOC machine, it’d already be done with that, and the whole process would take another five minutes, max. On this, I don’t even know. Hours, for sure.”

  We sat and stared at the screen for a while, even though it was pointless, as if we wanted to show the electrons tearing around in the CPU that we were there for them, and cheering them on, and really cared. Then Kit announced proudly that she’d made macaroni and cheese. She’d managed to get the amount of milk wrong, even though it was the kind in a box with only three instructions, but we made grateful noises and ate, and afterward I even surprised myself by sleeping.

  I woke before dawn, shivering. The cabin was far too cold, and at first I was annoyed to be, yet again, the first person awake. But I went eagerly to the kitchen, hoping that Rosko’s machine would show me something useful. No such luck—the software was still chewing away at its task, like an old man working on a stale bagel. I was itching for what it could tell us, and stood there with my arms wrapped around myself and my feet numb while I watched it for half a minute; a progress indicator in one corner of the screen rewarded me by shifting from 87.03 percent to 87.04 percent. Then I felt a breeze on my face, and when I found the front door hanging open, my half-awake brain went into melodrama mode: Daniel’s wandered off! Daniel’s wandered to the beach and drowned! Daniel’s been kidnapped in the night by the Seraphim! But you were sitting on the front step in the gray early light, once again bent over the glow from Iona’s camera.

  We found six memory cards in Mayo’s office. Each one had a tiny white label, filled out with dates in her handwriting. They were a miniature record of your life, your past, and even the past that preceded your past. You’d been inserting one after another, then cycling back through them again, as if determined to drink in every last detail of every image. Bill, absurdly young, leaning against a taxi in New York. Jimmy and Lorna, lounging on an emerald hillside in China. When I came out and sat down beside you, you were looking at a series that featured you and me as babies in Scotland, with Iona and Lorna being Proud Mums in scarves, green wellies, and comically dated hair.

  Any of the shots that included Jimmy or Lorna made my breathing ragged. I still had no confirmation of where they were, or whether they were safe or even alive. Seeing the photographs of them should have make me feel better, but instead I thought of the rituals you perform—One last look, shall we?—when you go through someone’s things after they die.

  “What I want you to do,” I said, putting my arm around your shoulder and trying to sound matter-of-fact and practical, “what I want you to do is see if you can identify each of the shots. Think about where they were taken, who was behind the camera, what else happened that day. Yes? There’s a story here, your story. Try to remember it and bring it back. Everything that’s nested around these pictures. Why were you there? What happened afterward? Were you happy? Anything.”

  Anything. I sounded desperate even to myself; I hoped you weren’t picking up on that part. At some level, at least, you knew what I was asking you to do, that much was clear. And, spookily, you could look at what appeared to be junk snapshots and say “Lorna Ainslie,” which meant you knew it was from before they married, or “Glasgow,” which—since it was Jimmy in front of a parked car—I couldn’t imagine how you knew. So it went: “Bill Calder. Boston.” “Iona. She’s happy.”

  It took a long time, because you examined each image in painstaking detail, clicking up to the highest magnification, poring over each one. I heard a pot being rattled in the kitchen, but ignored it. You came to another picture with you in it—aged about five this time—and I stopped you. “That’s you, Daniel. You. Do you understand that?”

  No, you didn’t. “Child,” you said. “Iona’s.” It was like you were learning about the life of someone else. You couldn’t see you—or else there was no you there to do the seeing. The few photographs where you couldn’t identify a person, or a place, you never even said I don’t know what this is. The word I had slipped through your mind’s fingers.

  The light had changed, almost an hour had passed, and I became aware of Rosko and Kit standing behind us with mugs of tea. I hadn’t even heard them get up. “What you make of it, Rosko?” Kit asked. I couldn’t tell whether she was trying to help or subtly hinting that I should at least let them help.

  “I’ve told Morag before,” he said. “I was there. And I don’t mean there at Ararat, there on the mountain. I mean, up there. With the Architects, while they were taking him. It only lasted a few moments, but—”

  The words stopped as I turned back to look at him, but his hands carried on, making loops and shapes in the air as if gestures could succeed where language failed. I waited.

  “I can only describe it by analogy. It felt like getting to a gate and being refused admission and watching Daniel step through the gate. Which probably makes it sound like the gates of heaven, but that’s not what I mean. It was like he passed through a barrier and was gone, and I couldn’t follow. By the way, the software just hung up at eighty-nine percent and shut down. I’m going to have to debug it and start again.”

  “Shit!” I screamed the wo
rd, as loud as I could; if I’d had anything in my hands, I’d have broken it. Something about the intensity of my frustration must have reached through to you, because you actually put the camera down for a moment and turned and hugged me. “Can’t we go get a faster machine from somewhere?” I said over your shoulder.

  “I was thinking that too,” Rosko said. “But I just looked at the error file, and I don’t think it’s the machine. It’s the software itself: there’s something about this data set that it’s not set up to handle. Give me time.”

  “We don’t have time.”

  I suppose that wasn’t very helpful. He threw a you-deal-with-her glance at Kit, and went back inside.

  We did OK, sort of, for a day or two after that, but it wasn’t easy. We were like settlers, cast ashore in an unforgiving land—no phone service, no Net, and fifteen miles to the nearest grocery store: serious privation—so we tried extra hard to be nice to each other and succeeded some of the time. Rosko worked and worked at the keyboard, Kit gave him neck massages, and I stuck with you and tried not to bug him. Kit and Rosko found my focus on you and the photographs irritating, as if I was encouraging you in an unhealthy obsession, but they were polite about it. Rosko was irritated (but equally polite) when Kit attacked the kitchen like one of hell’s Furies, and, once it was clean, proudly made us a string of bad meals based on overcooked spaghetti, freeze-dried chili, and undercooked rice. Meanwhile Kit and I became irritated with Rosko as he grew more and more uncommunicative. He kept promising to be done “soon,” and during occasional breaks would wander off on his own to stare at the ocean.

  “Are you OK?” I asked him when he had just returned. His hair was wild, his eyes distant.

  “Me? Fine. Tired, that’s all.”