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

  “Sure. Tired of not telling anyone else what you’re thinking.” The truth was, he’d been way more unsettled by his experience at Ararat than he’d ever let on, and had never really said much about what that experience was. Seraphim-curious now? Secretly half-convinced that “ascending to the Eternal” might be a good thing? I could have believed that.

  I was feeling my own growing claustrophobia; after Kit made some not-bad curried-chicken sandwiches and we’d eaten them in a tense, uneasy silence, it was a relief when she got up from the table and said, “I need a walk too. On the beach, but with all of us together. Come on. Let’s check out one more time that place for cell you found.”

  Rosko’s moody wandering had had one useful effect: he’d discovered a rocky point where it was possible to hold a phone in the air like a catcher’s mitt and catch maybe one bar. Canada lay across the strait like a gray battleship; YOU ARE NOW ROAMING INTERNATIONALLY, the messages said. Which was funny, almost: I’d spent my whole life roaming internationally, and here I was stuck like dried food to the rim of the United States. Never mind: this time, at last, we each got something. For Kit, several rambling messages from Natazscha about dealing with Carl’s body and the police. For Rosko, updates from his parents about nothing in particular. And for me, a frustrating fragment of the message I’d been waiting for all these weeks:

  ACROSS THE BORDER WITH THE OTHERS. TRYING TO GET FARTHER SOUTH, BUT WE CAN ONLY MOVE AT NIGHT. WE HOPE TO REACH

  Border? Others? And hope to reach where? No idea—my attempts to reply got me no response beyond Unavailable and System Error.

  We came down off the point and did another two or three miles along the beach—me and Rosko separately, you being gently pulled along by Kit’s hand. For an hour, none of us spoke. There were whitecaps on the strait like pills of wool on an old sweater. Lines of waves were coming in toward us at an angle to the beach, and the visibility was down to a mile or so: a bleak scene, with the surrounding world rubbed away. Eventually Rosko stopped to skim stones, and Kit stood a few paces back, her arm linked through yours, watching. There was a chill in the wind that made me want to keep moving, but I stood even farther back and didn’t say anything.

  “Daniel,” Kit said, “you keep looking at the photographs from Iona in New Guinea. Why is? What happens in New Guinea?”

  “He wasn’t even there,” I said. But she was right. You had the old Nikon in your hands even there on the beach, and at every spare moment you were shuffling through the images, as if the screen on the back was a window into a world you were trying to revisit. You’d linger over a shot, zoom in, and peer at the little screen as if examining every last pixel. Then you’d stare for five minutes at a blurred blowup of a stick, or someone’s knee, or a patch of mud. Thousands of images, stretching across ten years or more—but it was that one trip you kept coming back to, even though you’d been in Crete with Bill at the time.

  It wasn’t getting any easier for me to look at pictures involving Jimmy and Lorna, and changing the subject was tempting. But for better or worse, you seemed to be forcing me to turn over my memories, and I knew that might help you to recover your own. I moved down to the water and tried, without success, to skim a stone.

  “You need lower angle,” Kit said. Standing next to Rosko, she showed me how it was done. They competed for a couple of minutes. Five skips! Eight! Ten! She pushed him and laughed—which made him smile for the first time in a while—and I felt a pinch of jealousy about even that. Here was something easy, ordinary, and normal, something they were good at and could relax into doing together—and I (trying again) just didn’t have the knack.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid emotions. But Kit canceled them, thankfully, by grabbing my wrists and kissing me. “Daniel can’t tell me about the trip, Majka,” she said. “You tell.”

  So I did: everything from Lorna’s interest in the emergence of the first tools to trekking into the deep wilderness of the border territory and “discovering” the Tainu.

  “They were, what you say, uncontacted? Until then?”

  “Not quite. They’d traded with the lowland tribes in the Sepik River valley. And they’d already been ‘discovered’ by one other Westerner, a Baptist missionary named Kurtz. He’d taught them Tok Pisin along with his Bible stories and even baptized some of them. That’s why the kids I played with had names like Abel, Moses, and Natalis.”

  “But this Kurtz, he already is gone when you show up—why?”

  “Far as I could reconstruct, they kicked him out in disgust after he admitted that the ‘Jisas Kraist’ he kept talking about was someone he’d never met. You have to understand, for them it was like someone says, My chief is bigger and stronger than your chief, and they say, So where is he?, and you say, Oh, he’s coming, and then later you admit that he died two thousand years ago. It must’ve sounded like a bad joke.”

  “But why they put up with crazy Chen family?”

  “I don’t know. Because they didn’t know what to make of us? Because they were frightened of us too? They were certainly frightened of Lorna.”

  “Frightened of your mother?” Rosko asked incredulously. “I know she swears like a trucker, but that’s hard to believe.”

  “Aye, but they’d only ever seen one other Caucasian, and white freckled skin with strawberry-blond hair totally gave them the creeps. What broke the ice, what made it possible to win their trust, was my being able to pick up their language.”

  “You must have been the first outsider to use it,” Rosko said.

  “Kurtz must have tried. But Tain’iwa makes even Navajo look easy. All I know is, they were amazed by the idea that they could teach me their language. The idea that someone could go from not speaking to speaking was new to them, and they got a huge kick out of discovering they could teach me. They kept saying that by giving me Tain’iwa they were ola-apan gok’iwa geswet ar-apan—bringing me back from the dead.”

  “You’re the only non-native speaker of Tain’iwa in the world, then?”

  “Oxip’den di-amou, exip’den ki-amah.”

  “Bless you.”

  “It means ‘That which we think, so you will think.’ If we teach you our language, we can communicate our ideas to you. Or maybe feelings is the right word.”

  I was still holding the stone I’d picked up, so I leaned down and flipped it toward the water. It skipped twice, came to a halt, and seemed to pause for thought before going under. It reminded me of the boat at Antikythera, and I shuddered. Then I turned round and noticed that you were kneeling in the sand with a stick and had drawn a neat, perfect outline map of New Guinea. It even showed the Indonesian border, and the course of the Sepik River. With a decisive thrust, you placed the stick in the sand like a flagpole, right in the Tainu’s territory.

  “The volcano,” you said. “Here.” Which was curious: the fact that the Tainu had insisted there was a volcano at the center of their territory—in a place where any geologist could have told you that was impossible—wasn’t a detail I recalled sharing with you.

  “It’s a good map,” Rosko said. “By the way, Morag, how did you find out about the I’iwa? The Ghost People?”

  “Well—”

  Somewhere in the corner on my awareness there was a droning noise, like a low-flying plane. We were all looking down at your map. The drone grew closer. I was in the act of looking around for a plane when Kit grabbed my arm and screamed.

  “Majka, look out!”

  Too late.

  Time did stop, briefly, just long enough for my mother to put her head round the door of my consciousness and say, Morag, gurrl, I told ye, never stand wi’ your back to the water; sneaker waves, is what it’s called, aye, they come outta nowhere.

  Maybe it was the long-delayed wake of a ship. Maybe it was just an unusual wave. But it was big—and as I watched it narrowed and reared higher still, like a cartoon cobra, a glossy gray tongue of muscle. I was aware of Kit at my side, holding my arm in both hands: she barely even got splashed. Rosko was
two or three feet away, and barely a drop of water reached him. The cobra narrowed, reared, and lunged forward, hitting me at chest height, but the frothing cap surged right over my head, and I felt the cold invade my clothes—and my sinuses—even before I was slammed back onto the beach.

  Afterward I knew I’d never been in any real danger, because Kit never let go. All the undertow did was drag half a kilo of sand into my clothes. I was still in the final backwash of the wave—vaguely thinking to myself, Feelings, we were talking about feelings—when, with a show of strength I thought you were no longer capable of, you waded in, scooped me up in your arms, and carried me up the beach to dry ground.

  It was a long walk back to the cabin, and the shower was freezing misery. But it was followed by a dry towel, a clean bathrobe, and Rosko being a sweetie: he brought me an oversized mug of cocoa, with marshmallows floating on top, and looked shyly at me as if anxious to see whether the gesture was acceptable. While I sat there sipping it, you sketched me. I looked so pathetically sorry for myself that after I’d seen it—and Rosko reminded me that we’d been talking about the I’iwa—I made a conscious effort to sit up straight and put more light into my voice.

  “I found out about the I’iwa because Kurtz and my mother were both pale-skinned freaks who didn’t speak Tain’iwa.”

  “The Tainu thought the missionary and your mother were ghosts?”

  “Not literally. But they didn’t have any other category in which to make sense of them, and white people already fit into their world view in a way they weren’t jumping up and down to share. Maybe it was a taboo about mentioning their ancestors: that’s common. They’d gesture up-valley with a shudder, and refuse to look in that direction, as if they were saying, That’s where the ghosts live, not a place you ever want to go; let’s change the subject. I only found out more when one of the women died.”

  “She become ghost?” Kit said.

  “Not that I saw. But the Tainu do a strange thing with their dead. OK, so every culture does strange things with the dead. We don’t like dead bodies, and we want to get rid of them—we want to get rid of the very idea of death—so we dress our corpses in fancy clothes and stick them six feet under. Or burn them. The Tainu do the opposite. They place the dead person in a sitting position, on a sort of wooden deck chair, and smoke it whole over a fire—”

  “Then they eat corpse, are you going to tell me? Excuse me, I throw up. Sorry. Is becoming a habit.”

  I have to admit, I was getting a small kick out of teasing Kit by grossing her out. “No, no. They do end up looking like extra-large beef jerky with teeth, but the point of smoking them is to preserve them—to keep them around.”

  “And then what?”

  “They’re placed on cliffs overlooking the valleys. And they just sit there, for months or even years, scaring away the tribe’s enemies.”

  “Would be scaring the shitless of me,” Kit said.

  “The thing is, the Tainu made it clear that this dead woman, who had to be smoked for over a week, was still a real person. Embok dilu Tain’iwa is what they said—still part of the language community of the Tainu. At least until the flesh has rotted away.”

  “And the I’iwa?” Rosko asked. “Is that the next stage, after the body’s gone?”

  “That was my guess too, at first, because the Tainu said they were pale, and didn’t speak, and were hard to see. In a culture full of witchcraft and sorcery, being worried about something like that didn’t seem strange, so ‘ghosts’ was the natural way to think of it. Though the I’iwa coming out at night to hunt pigs and steal sweet potatoes, that was odd.”

  “So you began to think they might not be ancestors but a really, genuinely uncontacted tribe? Who paint their bodies with clay or something?”

  “Crossed my mind. A tribe near Goroka does that.”

  Speaking of ghosts, you’d been so silent that I’d almost forgotten you were there. But your reaction to what I’d said about the I’iwa reminded me to refocus. Your breath had quickened, and your eyes were flaring as if you were having a panic attack. You had the camera in your hands, of course, and in seconds you found a shot we’d looked at before: me with Jimmy and Lorna and our guides, standing on a chalky path in front of the tentacle roots of a pandanus tree.

  “Who are these two?” Rosko asked. “Guides? But she’s a child.”

  The sight of those two faces made me ache, almost as much as I was aching for Jimmy and Lorna. I’d missed them and thought about them and wondered about them ever since we left New Guinea. “Friends,” I said. “Good friends. This is Oma, the old headman, and his daughter, Isbet. Homer and Elizabeth, Josef Kurtz would have said. She was the same age as me.”

  “You say he give Christian names,” Kit said. “But Homer is Greek poet, yah?”

  “Homer was a blind storyteller. Oma was a good storyteller too, and he was going blind. He had cataracts.”

  “He can’t have been much of a guide, then.”

  “They were a team. Oma had a staggering mental map of the Tainu’s territory, like he could remember every path and gully for miles around. But he was learning to rely on Isbet’s eyes. Between the two of them, they could safely take you anywhere.”

  You produced the New Guinea map you’d torn from the Eislers’ atlas.

  “That’s right, Daniel,” Kit said. “New Guinea.” And to me: “He is trying to tell us something about this.”

  “No shit,” I said—and immediately hated myself for sounding so dismissive.

  What were you trying to tell us? That you remembered me talking about New Guinea and the I’iwa? That seeing the pictures from there reminded you of Iona, and made you miss her? That you now knew something about what she believed, and were trying to tell me what it was? I had no idea. Your dad used to say, For any finite body of evidence, there are always infinitely many consistent theories. Great.

  “Talk to me, Daniel,” I said. “Talk to me, somehow. What is it you’re thinking?” But you only looked at me with what seemed, more than ever, to be a combination of frustration and pity. So I turned angrily to Rosko, who’d just walked out of the room and come back in again. “What about you? Why don’t you talk to me, Eisler? You, who’s been busy not saying what you really think ever since Ararat?”

  Boy, I was becoming unpleasant. I was so angry that I managed the whole diatribe before I realized that he was holding his damned silly laptop with its screwed-up software in his hands.

  He had every right to be angry right back at me. But his expression was one I couldn’t read. Exhaustion? Puzzlement? Affection, even? Pity?

  “It’s finished,” he said, holding up the machine. “One hundred percent. And I’m prepared to talk now.”

  CHAPTER 12

  WHAT RAVEN DID

  “Morag,” he said, “I did try to tell you what I thought, right at the beginning, but you didn’t want to listen. I’ve been trying to accept that. I’ve even been trying to persuade myself that maybe I was wrong and you were right. But Ararat—”

  “Yes?”

  “Ararat was so strange, so far outside of anything else in my experience, that it’s almost impossible to put into words. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a clear picture in my mind. They took Daniel. Whatever happens to people afterward—‘up there,’ I mean, in the realm of the Whatever—the Architects take the conscious experiences stored in our minds as their raw material. Do they install our memories in their own minds? Do they just consume them like cookies? I don’t know. But they take them, and they took Daniel’s. Sure, he’s not a complete Mystery—in other words, the process was interrupted, and they didn’t take everything. That’s why he has some language left, plus these random obsessions like Iona, and the fires, and New Guinea. Those things make it look to you like he’s got some important clue to communicate. But there’s no reason to think that. They’re fragments, like pieces of a dream. Or the things shamans say when they’re five miles high on peyote.”

  Kit could probably see that I wa
s about to boil over. I was—I felt completely betrayed. To change the subject, she jerked her head toward the computer. “What about this? Famous Disks you and Majka are wanting to understand. Anything?”

  “That’s the other piece of bad news. The other part I’ve been suspecting, but not quite admitting to myself. Morag, you said a long time ago that you doubted Bill’s analysis.”

  “What about it?”

  “You said he’d never looked beyond the assumption that it was an ancient language, something spoken by the ancient Minoans or the Therans. And maybe he was wrong; maybe it wasn’t a language, but something else.”

  All that was true, but I was feeling too resentful, too angry about his pessimism, to even nod.

  “Well,” he said, “the statistical analysis shows—it shows—” He stopped again, blew out a long breath, and looked at you. Then he closed the laptop. “Let me tell you a story.”

  “They brought me to ISOC because I was a Babbler,” he said. “Just like you are, Morag. When I first got there, the linguists were interested in assessing my learning speed. So they gave me the toughest language they could think of, then checked me out under the scanner twice a week.”

  “What they throw at you?” Kit asked. “Something Asian, I am betting. Vietnamese?”

  “Good guess. They started with Korean, and that resulted in at least one published research paper on the growth of my neural kudzu under learning stress. But even Korean was too easy for the ISOC sadists. They found an old Canadian First Nations guy from way up the coast. Albert. I never did get a last name. He spoke Nuxalk—Nu-haug-wlk. It’s a language on the verge of extinction from a valley in British Columbia. A totally alien set of phonemes, and some of the words have no vowels, which makes it impossible even to say how many syllables they have. It might as well be a language from another planet.”

  I was determined not to participate in the conversation, and I’d snuck over to your chair and was hugging you, my face pressed against your chest, unsure which of us was comforting which. But I was listening to every word.