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

  The Architects, still at work.

  And the Seraphim faithful—but it wasn’t a faith, Julius Quinn had insisted, hadn’t he? It wasn’t a faith because it wasn’t a religion, even if everyone, including me, kept calling it that. No: it was the truth—and those who called themselves the Seraphim because they had accepted the truth were still there, still waiting to accept their infinite reward.

  We were following the line of a deep gully. Its edges reminded me of saw blades, and there were more gullies on either side. I was supposed to be saying something helpful, like What about landing over there? I see a place over there! Only, there wasn’t enough there to set down a phone.

  There was a sickening drop, a half second of zero-g during which my brain decided to brighten up its last moment with a picture of Einstein, clothes rumpled and hair wild, in delighted free fall: the lightbulb moment when he gets it that acceleration and gravity are the same thing.

  Mack slapped at the dashboard and said something in Armenian that was probably unprintable; it must have worked, because our descent rate corrected itself so abruptly that my stomach tried to escape through my sinuses. We leveled out after that, which was good. Not so good was the fact that we were flying almost sideways.

  “The tail must be damaged,” he said. “I can’t keep us in the air much longer.”

  A band of green appeared. A smear on the windshield? A trick of the light. But Mack pointed at it. “Crops. That’s the Aras River valley. Ten kilometers.”

  Small farms came into view. Fields. Even a few trees. Behind us, Ararat still loomed; the curve of the slope made it look like we were trying to outrun a tsunami. We flew almost straight for a minute, but as the helicopter slowed down, it slewed hard to the left again, like a supermarket trolley with a jammed wheel. We sunk to ten or fifteen feet off the ground but kept moving. There was a sound I mistook for the squeal of a pig—our tail section dragging through the branches of a tree—and, after hanging motionless for a second, we went to the ground like a dropped brick.

  By pure chance, the wheels were level. By pure chance, we landed in plowed soil, or the impact would have snapped our necks.

  “Help Daniel,” I shouted. From behind one of the seats I grabbed a bag with a big red medical “+” on the front. I unbuckled Rosko, took his good arm, and threw us both out the side door.

  There was barely time to get him away from the slowing rotors and collapse on a low mound of earth before the true eruption came.

  The pulse of light was the pure, pure white of a bleached sheet. Nothing like lightning: though it seemed to come from the summit, the whole sky lit up; the whole atmosphere lit up.

  What happened next was a monster version of what Rosko had shown us on that video of when your mom was killed in Patagonia. The spherical bubble of pressure started at the summit and moved out silently toward us like a magic fishbowl, kicking up a line of snow and dust to mark its progress across the scree. Mack was still in the helicopter, helping you to the door. I had time only to scream a useless warning.

  “Watch out!”

  It was like being punched, hard, not in one place but all over at the same time. It blew me off my feet, hurling me past where Rosko was seated and into the dirt. I felt as if someone had jammed their thumbs into my ears and a knee into my gut, and every inch of my exposed skin crackled and stung. I looked up to see you and Mack thrown from the door of the helicopter as the pressure wave picked it up on the other side. The whole machine balanced over you, motionless, then continued to topple sideways. You and Mack were lying right beneath it.

  “Move move move!” I screamed. At the last possible moment, he grabbed you to him and rolled. One of the rotors slowed the fall for a moment, but the blade snapped off and bounced sideways into the grass like a vaulter’s dropped pole. The lower edge of the airframe came down and met the ground, missing you by inches.

  For a few seconds, we thought it was over, then we felt a powerful thump in the ground beneath us, like a giant was trying to break out of the earth with a hammer. Another thump. Then three more in quick succession.

  The summit was a pristine white cone—

  A pristine white cone—

  But a moment later it had gone, and what remained was a broad white Puritan’s collar of snow surrounding a vertical column of fire.

  We crouched or stood, immobilized by the sight. It unfolded before us in absolute silence. But of course it did. We were miles away, and it took more than a minute for that awful sound to reach us.

  Roaring? No. Booming? No. Imagine a giant dragging truck-sized rocks in a chain-mail bag across the steel deck of a ship. It was an unholy choir of fifty notes, all combined into a single deafening howl. It snapped us out of our amazement, and we fled, but the ground was trembling so hard that even Mack and I kept losing our footing. Rosko understood the danger, but his jaw was rigid from pain, and I was afraid that at any moment he would faint and pitch face-first into the earth. And you’d been reduced to a chameleon’s slowness, like someone trying to recall what movement is. Mack and I had to take turns pulling you along.

  A dark wall of vapor and pulverized rock was pouring down off Ararat’s higher flanks. Judging its size or speed was impossible. After we’d gone half a mile, pellets of smoking rock began to fall around us. Fires started in some of the drier grass, forcing us to run faster while breathing the smoke. We passed a farm building as several large chunks hit the roof. The sound they made was odd, hollow, unexpected—like arrows thudding into the wet bole of a tree.

  “This way,” Mack yelled, peeling off to the left. My eyes were streaming. My throat burned. I had your arm in mine and turned you toward him, but a mini-meteor of burning material arced into the ground a few steps ahead and brightened at the moment of impact. It was like seeing a video clip of a firework played backward. When I’d guided you around the foot-deep smoking pit, Mack was nowhere to be seen.

  A moment of panic—then I heard Rosko’s voice: “Over here.”

  I followed the smudged outline of his back, climbing and stumbling on the rutted, stony ground. A hundred yards later the chunks of rock stopped coming down. A few more pebbles, then grit, then nothing. A cloud of ash was still coming our way, but we’d reached the river.

  The central column above the mountain was thinner than I expected, a slender black mushroom stalk reaching thousands of feet into the sky. But the summit had cleared already, the earlier smoke dragged higher by the convection currents, and the strange blackening in the sky itself, which had come with the Architects, was nowhere.

  It wasn’t a neat, symmetrical eruption. The north side of the summit, where we’d been, was almost intact, but the south side had radically changed shape. A vertical plume at first, followed by a massive sideways collapse away to our left—like Mount Saint Helens. The whole once-beautiful mountain had been turned into a horseshoe. It hadn’t lost much height, just a big chunk of its core, and it was now a deep, crab-shaped caldera, its claws grasping out to the southeast.

  I thought of Babel again—both Babels. The ruined ziggurat at Babylon, under the outline of which I’d dug and studied with Jimmy and Lorna and your dad, which for so many centuries had been misidentified as the original site of humanity’s divine spanking. And the vaporized mountain at Thera—Strongyle, as they’d called it: the round island—which had turned out to be the true site, so much earlier, of an enigmatic transaction between promises and demands, belief and unbelief, human beings and something both more and less than human.

  So. Another great mountain breathes fire, and once again the gods announce their arrival with charred corpses, shattered rock, and stunned survivors promoting strange, strangely enticing beliefs. ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIAN GODS RETURN TO WREAK NEW HAVOC UPON THE HUMANS THEY FOOLED ONCE BEFORE! Now there’s a theory—if you’re a sucker for headline-making supernatural woo-woo. Me? Not so much. For me, well trained by Bill Calder, being forced to take it seriously was like being thrown into the sea with my hands tied.

 
; I set out the medical gear and did what I could to fix up Rosko’s wounds. He was bruised all over, cut and scraped all over, but neither his mangled hand nor the gash on his head were life-threatening. I found an aluminum tourniquet in the bag, and stabilized the hand by putting his whole forearm in a sling. Lorna’s voice came back to me as I did it: Nooo, gurrl, not like that. Like thuss. Aye, aye, well, not so terrible. Now untie the knot and gie’t another go, eh? Tighter thuss time. I looked south, toward Baghdad, and allowed some superstitious corner of my brain an attempt to sense whether they were OK, to sense whether they were alive. Nothing, of course—which proved nothing, of course.

  Rosko’s head wound was still oozing blood. I dabbed off the worst, squirted on half a bottle of Betadine, and packed it with gauze. When I tightened a bandage over it, he gasped.

  “Scheisse!”

  That must have been the moment when I started the habit of talking to you all the time. It was a way of mastering the panic. Up to that moment, I’d been too focused on staying alive, and keeping you and Rosko alive, to think much about what had happened up there, but I was aware of you next to me, frantically aware of the need to assess your mental state and engage with you, to in some way hang on to you, as if at that moment you might be drifting out of reach. I could feel panic rising in my throat like a wave of nausea—so I started chatting.

  “Can’t take this boy anywhere, can we, Daniel?” I said, stealing a glance in your direction as I administered water and pills to Rosko. “Do you remember Patagonia? You saved Rosko’s skin there, and he just returned the favor. But he’s a mess all over again. What do you make of his injuries? I see two broken fingers and the head wound. On the bright side, none of the major arteries came to the party, did they? Back and legs seem to be OK too, so all those expensive titanium spare parts they installed after your little adventure on the Torre Sur must be working. Anything to add to that, Dr. Calder? No?”

  I was willing you to speak, to say something normal, to snap out of it. But you didn’t respond. You were looking at me; I felt that in some sense at least you were following what I was saying, but your face was a mask of puzzlement. I felt a hot flare of emotion, fear that I was losing you mixed with anger at myself, and even resentment at you—as if you were rejecting me. I made a conscious effort to suppress the thought and blundered on.

  “Well then, what else does Trauma Specialist Morag see? Collarbones look OK. Ribs, can’t tell about the ribs, but that doesn’t matter because there’s squat we can do about ribs except advise the patient to abstain from wrestling and sex. What our German friend needs is a fancy, complicated piece of kit called a hospital. But they forgot to squeeze one of those into the medical bag, so we’re going to have to look after him as best we can. Aren’t we? Yes? Good.”

  Rosko seemed to understand what I was doing, but he didn’t join in. It was me he addressed, catching his breath between each short sentence.

  “I was in the crevasse. Right behind him.”

  “I know.”

  “A slab of ice came down off the opposite wall. Size of a car. Size of a truck. It was going to kill me for sure. Instead it fell to one side and trapped my hand. It was like it was looking at me, waiting, thinking about whether to make my death slow or quick. But it shifted the other way instead, released my hand, jammed itself across the crevasse at an angle. Funny, almost. It was going to kill me, and then it seemed to change its mind, and it was the only reason I was able to climb out.”

  He paused and took several huge, gulping breaths, like sobs. “I felt it, Morag. It was awful. I was there, and I saw. I saw it, felt it, taking him.”

  “Don’t, Rosko.”

  But he wouldn’t stop. “It was like I was inside him and inside the Architect at the same time. I could feel him being stretched out, emptied out, each little element of his experience, his feelings, his memories, and his sense of himself. Being extracted from his body in infinitely small grains. Like sugar being sucked up through a straw.”

  “Rest,” I said. “Try not to talk.”

  “Remember what I told you about the accident in Patagonia? How I was falling, and I knew I was going to die?”

  I dabbed at his face with an antiseptic wipe. “Aye. You said you felt calm about it. Accepting.”

  He nodded. “Like it was meant to be. And when I didn’t die, when I woke up in the hospital, I felt terrible, as if I’d been rejected. This was the same. For a minute, when I managed to climb out of the crevasse and get to Daniel, I felt that I was no longer inside my body. I was up there, with them, and I wanted to be with them.”

  “With the Architects? And you wanted them to take Daniel?”

  “I had to fight it. It was like, the whole time I was running to him, grabbing him, and getting him back to you, I was having a sort of argument with myself about what was best. It’s—I’m sorry, it’s hard to put into words.”

  A minute earlier I’d not wanted him to talk about it; I’d not wanted to know, not yet; now I was frustrated that he couldn’t be more articulate.

  “Try,” I said. “Try, Rosko. I’m a mite confused right now. Atheist Encounters Ancient Gods? It’s hard to process. I’ve been trying not to believe my own eyes. So far, you’re not helping.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t help with that. I don’t know what they are, Morag. But believe your eyes is all I can say. They’re real, and it’s like they want to take a person’s experiences to another place.”

  “Which is what Shul-hura’s religion was preaching three thousand years ago in Babylon, according to the tablets Bill and I translated. It’s also what Julius Quinn says in Anabasis. Taking our experiences out of the body to some place where they don’t depend on the body. All of which makes no sense, because the mind depends totally on the brain. All that afterlife stuff is rubbish.”

  “I’d have agreed with you completely, until today.”

  “So you’re telling me you’re a convert to the Seraphim now?”

  “I don’t know what I’m telling you. It’s too strange. I want to know why part of me did believe that their taking Daniel was in his own interest—and another part of me didn’t believe it. And I want to know why I felt sorry for them: Why did I feel that these gods, or whatever the hell they are, were needy and desperate? And why did I sense that they wanted Daniel, but not you or me?”

  You weren’t listening to any of this, or you didn’t seem to be. You were crouched close to me, alert but calm, rubbing a pinch of dirt between your fingers like a tracker scanning the ground for evidence. I allowed myself a sip of optimism. Your body language wasn’t right for a Mystery. More nearly normal than that, more relaxed.

  “Daniel,” I said, crouching next to you. “It’s Morag. Look at me.”

  You were still wearing your dad’s down mountain jacket, the one he’d slipped off and passed to you on the summit, before the fight with Mayo and the fall into the crevasse. A madman’s bar chart of drying blood stretched from its collar all the way down one sleeve; right at the end, near the Velcro cuff, there was a rust-colored handprint. It looked as if you’d been bleeding from the neck, but the red cells were all Rosko’s, deposited there when he’d carried you. I grabbed your wrists. “Daniel Calder. Please. Look at me.”

  You did. And with a flood of relief I saw, or thought I saw, that it was you. Not that awful blank look of the Mysteries. But your eyes held mine for only a second, before darting away, settling on my forehead, my nose, my eyes again, my chin. As if you didn’t recognize me—or as if you didn’t even grasp that I was a person. Your gaze came back to me again, and slid off me again. Drawn back to the river.

  “Daniel, what happened up there?”

  You said nothing. It was as if you were waiting for me to notice something, and I had to blink away tears and control my breathing before I did. In the earth at your feet, right in front of me, you’d scratched a crude outline of the mountain, complete with the double peak: Ararat and Little Ararat. But the top of the main triangle was open, and
a single curled line rose from it. The symbol of the Seraphim.

  “What does it mean, D? That they’re right? That you’re one of them now? I don’t understand. All I want to do is bring you back.”

  You drew a circle on the ground, around the outline of the mountain.

  “What’s that?” Rosko said. “The earth?”

  You didn’t say. Your only response was to reach down with your splayed fingers and rub the image away.

  Mack was standing forty or fifty feet away, on a rock at the edge of the riverbank. He turned in a slow arc, with one hand up to shade his eyes. In the other hand he had a small military-green compass.

  “Where are we?” Rosko asked.

  “I was right. This is the river Aras. We’re still in Turkey, but that”—he pointed to the other bank, a hundred meters away—“is Armenia.”

  “This is the border?”

  “Yes.” He pointed to the northeast, where a tower was visible on a ridge. “See that? Khor Virap. It’s a monastery. Come on.”

  I hate water—have I ever mentioned that? Just in case, I’ll mention it again: I hate water. I hate it so much that I never learned to swim. Even when we’d found a place where the Aras was only fifty yards wide, I had to endure the humiliation of it being impossible to hide the fact that I was scared out of my wits. The river was shallow enough to wade, mostly, and there was a gravel bar in the middle, but Mack had to help us over one by one: Rosko because of his injuries, you because it seemed you might at any moment sit down in the current and let it carry you away, and me because I was rigid with terror. The lines of current in the water looked like alligators to me; they always do.

  When we emerged on the other side, with my heart rate back below 120, a thin veil of ash reached us. We found ourselves in vineyards that had already turned gray: arriving in Armenia was like walking into a crumbling black-and-white photograph. We reached a dirt road and followed it north, up a shallow slope that rose above the vineyards. Soon we saw the river again, below us, and a shadowy outline of the mountain.