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

  “Mumma! Look!”

  The trilobite was a good clean specimen, almost as long as my thumb.

  “Mumma, no one has touched this in millions of years!”

  As she came over, her crinkly red hair was all over the place in the wind, her hands gritty from digging and sifting. She nodded appreciatively.

  “No human bein’ has ever touched it, Morag. Not once, until now. Thuss poor little bugger got buried in the sand a hundred million years ago. Opposable thumbs weren’t even a twinkle in evolution’s eye back then—our ancestors still looked like rats, probably. So ye’re the first.”

  “The first ever? The first ever ever ever, in the whole history of the universe?”

  “Feels good, aye?”

  It felt better than good: it was the best birthday present I ever had. Not the fossil itself, so much as the thrill of reaching down that far into the well of the past.

  I decided I’d become an adult that day, so I started calling them Jimmy and Lorna. They rolled their eyes at first, then got used to it. But I was still a child, in some ways even a normal one. Passionate, but careless: for years afterward, I kept the trilobite in an old jewelry box, in a nest of tissue paper, and got it out to examine under a magnifier from time to time; then, unaccountably, I lost it.

  At least now I’d found my mother again.

  “Mumma, listen to me. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s what we have to do. Daniel is—Daniel is—”

  “Daniel is what, gurrl?”

  “They tried to take him on Ararat. Rosko rescued him, but he’s—not well. He’s lost a lot of weight, and—”

  “Where is he?”

  “In Seattle still, with Rosko Eisler and—look, the point is, I think he learned something on Ararat, about what’s really going on, but now he can’t communicate.”

  “Oh, Morag, I’m so sorry. You’re saying he’s a Mystery?”

  “No! It’s not that simple.” I tried to describe how you were: the fragments of speech, the drawings, the sense that you were like a man with his arms bound, trying to reach out.

  And your voice. I didn’t want to say it, not even to Lorna. Especially not to Lorna. “It’s almost as if Iona is communicating through him. Or, I don’t know, a fragment of her is buried inside him. Like, she told him something. After she was dead. I’m sorry. I know none of this makes any sense.”

  It was annoying that the static had gone, because over the clear line, she could hear me sobbing.

  Her voice came back much softer. “Morag, Morag. Ye’ve had a really rough time, haven’t ye? We were worried about ye o’ course, but we had no idea. I’m sorry, love. I’m sorry we’ve not been there.”

  That made me feel weepier and more emotional than ever. I felt too tired to be interested in persuading her to come to New Guinea or anywhere else—I just wanted her to be with me. And boss me about. And not mind when I did the opposite of whatever she told me to do.

  I forced myself to sound calmer: “Tell me something,” I said. “While you were in Iraq, or wherever, did you and Jimmy speak to anyone who’d actually been at Ararat? Or hear any stories about people undergoing Anabasis and disappearing, and then showing up again?”

  “Oh aye. Lots of whisperin’ about that around Mosul. An’ we met a Kurdish woman, Seraphim up to the ears, who insisted that she’d converted because her son had returned. He’d been right there in the middle o’ the eruption, she claimed. Ka-boom. An’ then a week later he came back to find her an’ tell her all about partyin’ with the Architects. Reincarnation, naturally some of them’s usin’ that word, though it pisses off the Traditionals an’ doesn’t fit in with what Quinn said either.”

  “Did you believe her?”

  “O’ course not. It’s pretty thin stuff, isn’t it, if ye think about it? I mean, if Jimmy disappeared an’ then came back a week later with a glassy stare an’ a cockamamie story about dying an’ comin’ back to life, I’d ask him what the hell he’d been smokin’. Why do ye ask?”

  “Because Daniel predicted it, that’s all.”

  “Predicted people would come back? Really?”

  But the line fizzed ominously again, and it was all too complicated, so I changed the subject. She’d already evaded a couple of questions about what had happened to them in Iraq. “Are you both OK to travel?”

  “Oh aye, we’re absolutely fine.”

  If she’d said We’re fine, I’d have believed her; I could tell from absolutely that she was lying. “OK, so tell me. What really happened to you? Come on, tell me the truth.”

  “Och, not so much. We were rounded up near Erbil by a Sunni group. They were goin’ to give us the chop. Thought we were Seraphim, see, an’ the Seraphim are polytheists, an’ if there’s one thing the jihadi boys can’t stand, it’s a polytheist. Jimmy managed to persuade them we were Christians, because that was the next most plausible thing. We spent a while chained up in an abandoned American barracks. Jimmy speakin’ some Arabic came in way handy, aye. Made friends wi’ one o’ the guards, a nice village boy who brought us extra bread an’ then looked the other way while we escaped.”

  “Then you just got on bicycles and headed for the border, or what?”

  “No, escapin’ was the easy part. We had to hide in the desert. Plenty o’ experience with that, luckily. Jimmy saved us from dyin’ o’ thirst by making a solar still out o’ a rock, an oil can, an’ half a fertilizer bag.”

  “And you got to Jordan, and you’re OK now?” I repeated. “Are you sure?”

  She didn’t answer my question. “Morag, what about Daniel?”

  “I was getting to that. Charlie Balakrishnan’s arranging for Daniel to come directly to Telefomin from Seattle. He’ll be flying with um, a friend. Kit.”

  “Kit?”

  “Yes.”

  “That wouldn’t be Natazscha Cerenkov’s daughter?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Really? Yekaterina is ‘Kit.’ An’ she’s not a friend, she’s ‘um-a-friend’? Well, well, well, Morag, yer full o’ surprises. I don’t recall ye having um-a-friend before.”

  “She’s—she’s—it’s—”

  I had no idea what to say. For about ten dozen reasons, I didn’t even know what I wanted to say. What was the important bit here? I tried out various things in my mind. I’m gay: no, that got it all wrong, because it sounded like I’m a socialist or something, and I didn’t “identify as gay” any more than straight people “identify as straight”—I just happened to be madly in love with one particular person, and that person happened to be Kit. I’ve never felt like this about anyone in my whole life: OK, so that was true, but it was too gushy to say to my mother. It’s all so new: true, vague, a cliché. It’s already over: probably true, hard to say without whining. It feels like my heart is trying to strangle itself. I trailed off into silence.

  “Fancy a mother not noticin’ a thing like that,” Lorna said. And then she saved my blushes by returning to our earlier conversation. “Telefomin—my goodness. Such a long time. All right, all right. Ye’re mad, is all I can say, an’ Jimmy’ll say I’m mad to have agreed. I know exactly what he’ll say: Single most crackbrained scheme she’s ever dreamed up. We’ll get there as soon as we can.”

  Balakrishnan insisted on being wheeled down to the garden to see me off. Sunil and Vandana were supposed to be there too, but they hadn’t shown up and Kai was standing by the SUV, looking at his fat black diver’s watch.

  “Mrs. Chaudry,” Balakrishnan said, “are those little rascals coming or not?”

  Before she had a chance to answer, I heard a gate bang shut and flip-flops slapping on the path at the side of the house. Sunil came around the corner at full speed with his sister just behind him.

  “Morag-ákulan!”

  “Morag-ínjaia!”

  “Hi, guys,” I said. I didn’t even ask what their greeting meant, because they were too full of questions. Had Uncle Akshay and worked out what the Seraphim were doing in Hawaii? Had we worked out how to m
ake him live forever? They wanted to teach me Ildavan—which was a big special privilege, because it was really their secret language, but they thought I’d understand, and not go teaching it to just anyone—so when was I coming back? And where was I going?

  Kai opened the passenger door and coughed. I was flying commercial—first class, in compensation for none of BalakInd’s planes being immediately available, but I still had to make the plane.

  “I’m going to New Guinea,” I said. “A big island north of Australia.”

  “I know,” Sunil trilled importantly. “They have more languages there than anywhere else in world.”

  “Yes. And I’m going there to look for a tribe of people who supposedly don’t speak any language and who guard a volcano that doesn’t exist.”

  When I was seated in the back of the SUV again, and the garden wall was magically sliding out of the way, I looked back. Sunil bounced a soccer ball on one knee, oblivious. Balakrishnan watched me steadily, as if willing me to succeed. Vandana gave her shoulders an almost imperceptible shake. I slid the window down and leaned out.

  “What did that mean?”

  Her eyes creased in an impish smile. “Let’s see. A good translation might be, um—” She counted ostentatiously on her fingers, as if to remind me of all the possibilities they’d invented. “Jékamekt? Or kq’ud’zuq? Or obia oniatat o’oa? Or maybe thutheg cham phe amphai?”

  “I get it,” I said. “But what did all those mean, Vandana? In English.”

  It was Balakrishnan who answered the question. “They mean ‘good luck,’ Morag.”

  It was the last thing he said to me. A few weeks later he was dead. And it wasn’t even his faulty genes that killed him.

  PART IV:

  GHOSTS

  CHAPTER 17

  FISCHER’S KINGDOM

  Dragged halfway around the world in the wrong direction, normal parents would have demanded a detailed justification, footnotes and all. But then normal parents take for granted all that stuff about adolescent brains being only half-baked and therefore crap at everything, especially risk assessment, so they also take for granted that their kids are screwups, and probably engaged right now in some idiotic, life-threatening mistake, of a kind the parents themselves would never have made, not ever, no way, not in a million years. (And, you know, let’s not mention that story about the stash, the party, and the motorbike.)

  Luckily for me, Jimmy and Lorna had never been within a light year of normal, and their default parenting position was always that I must be doing what I’m doing for a reason, and that they’d find out the reason eventually. So when they showed up in New Guinea only half a day after I did—“Lorna put the fear of God into the visa people,” Jimmy explained proudly—they demanded nothing from me. We used up hours and hours just hugging, crying, laughing, and exchanging details. Over hot tea and a really bad meal at what passes in Telefol country for a restaurant, all Jimmy said by way of probing was “This is wonderful. Wonderful. But I still don’t really get why we’re here. Tell me about Daniel again, and why you think this has something to do with the Tainu.”

  If I’d played coy, if I’d said, “Wait and see,” they’d have done just that. (Freaks. Call the parent police.) But it seemed unfair to make them wait.

  “I don’t know why,” I said, “but Daniel clearly thinks the I’iwa hold the key to what I’ve been looking for. And they’re not a legend. They exist.”

  When I described the two photographs, Lorna’s response was not what I expected.

  “Sod it,” she said, turning to Jimmy. “We should’ve listened, aye?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Iona told you she’d seen them, and you didn’t tell me?”

  Jimmy put his hand on my arm. “There was nothing much to tell, not at the time. Not much to tell later, if it comes to that. But that last evening she was with us—”

  “When she came back from the waterfall?”

  “Yes. You were just a child. She didn’t want to frighten you. So she kept two details to herself until after you’d turned in for the night. Those two details were, well, they were an interesting story. But frankly we thought she was imagining things. You remember the hand ax she found?”

  Of course I did. “Just like the rumors you’d heard. Tools that were very primitive, like something from the Paleolithic.”

  “She told us that just as she picked it up, she heard a noise, and she turned in time to see a figure in the trees behind her.”

  “She saw the I’iwa?”

  “A figure in the trees, that’s all. Holding a spear, she thought. The thing she kept repeating was ‘Lorna, Jimmy, listen: it was dark there, under the trees. I could only see it because it was white. And there are no short, naked white people in this part of the world.’ Talk about seeing a ghost! Of course we said, ‘Must have been a trick of the light, Iona; you’re very tired, Iona,’ all that sort of thing. But she wouldn’t buy it.”

  “You didn’t investigate?”

  “Oma an’ Isbet took us as far as they’d go,” Lorna said.

  “What about the ax?”

  “Disappeared. An’ we probably couldn’t have dated it anyway. A wooden arrow or ax handle, bingo—but wi’ no organic material, ye have no decaying isotopes.” She shrugged. “The ax was a puzzler. But we never saw another one, an’ it was just very hard to believe Iona’s story.”

  “Time to put on the hiking boots,” Jimmy said.

  But not so fast.

  As we wandered around that afternoon, reminiscing about our work there and taking in the familiar smell of the place, we bumped into an old friend, a Telefol woman named Fula.

  “The town’s changed,” she said. “Do you remember how it was? More missinari than local people. Seventh-Day Adventist. Pentecostal. Catholic—”

  “Evangelical Lutheran,” Lorna continued. “Australian Church o’ Christ the Savior. Tasmanian Church o’ Jesus the Nazarene. Aye. I always wondered if gettin’ saved by two different missions meant the first one wasn’t valid.”

  Fula smiled thinly. “Everything different now. A few of the old missions still here. But Seraphim is big thing now. Danish man, Johannes Fischer, is chief. Some people he make believe in these Architects. Most of us, we are like the old missinari. Frightened of him.”

  “We should talk to him,” Jimmy said. “But what do you mean, chief?”

  “He get the government in Port Moresby to make him district commissioner for whole area.” She trailed her hand through the air, taking in everything around us and ending with our objective in the northwest. “You want to go up there again? Into Star Mountains? You have to get his permission.”

  You and Kit arrived the next morning, while we were waiting to see Fischer. Natazscha and Rosko weren’t with you. Kit ran across the grass from the little plane, dragging you by the hand, kissed me all over my face right in front of Jimmy and Lorna, and then pulled you toward us for a three-way hug.

  “Hi, Jimmy and Lorna,” she said breathlessly, breaking free to hug them both too. “Is so good to see you, and I am really great to be here! One of Mr. Balakrishnan’s company planes took me and Daniel whole way to the capital. Port—”

  “Moresby,” Lorna said.

  “Yah, Port Moresby. My mother, she refuse to come. She also does not want me to come, actually, but then I overhear long conversation she has with Charlie Balakrishnan, and I think he uses, like, ten-liter bottle of charm. She goes all blushes and eyelids batting—yes, Mr. Balakrishnan, no, Mr. Balakrishnan—and she say to me, OK, OK, you can take Daniel out there, you can visit with Morag. Excuse me, did I mention I am crazy about your daughter? But I guess you guess that? Anyway, Natazscha says me, yah, you can take Daniel, and make sure everyone is fine, and then immediately, Yekaterina, you must—”

  She raised one finger, and swept it in an arc back toward Seattle.

  I was horrified. And confused—still trying to take in the kisses, still trying to backtrack to that phrase crazy about your daughter.
I actually grabbed her by the arm to slow her down. “You’re going to leave again? You’re going to fly straight back?”

  “Majka, let me finish. There was Seraphim marches all over, last couple days. Seattle also, and many of them turning into riot. Is like, religious war not in Syria or something but middle of downtown, outside the Nordstrom. Natazscha is frightened things are falling apart, and she thinks I will be safer with her. Or thinks she will be safer with me. Both of which is like, total crapshit—”

  “But you’re not—you’re not—?”

  She held my face in both hands. “Majka, take fifteen deep breaths, OK? Of course not. You are very dumb sometimes for smart person. I stay here with you, and Daniel, until this thing is finished. My mother will be fine. If she is angry, I’m sorry, but she can frankly stuff everything.”

  “What about Rosko?”

  “Rosko is complicated.”

  “He’s angry with me for being angry with him? Or he’s just given up?”

  But she shook her head. “He’s fine,” she said quickly, as if dismissing the subject. “Gabi basically forbid him to come.” She obviously wasn’t telling me everything, but at that moment you managed to change the subject for her by handing me a drawing. The gesture reminded me of when you’d given me the one of Kit—which I was carrying, carefully folded, in my pocket. But this was one of the bald cavemen you’d drawn before—a single figure, face not visible, crouched over a fire. I more or less ignored it, I’m afraid.

  “Thanks, D. How are you? You’re skinnier than a measuring tape.”

  “He not eating, not sleeping, just pacing and muttering all the time,” Kit said. “I say to him, Daniel, you eat, because if you die of starvation, Majka is killing me. But he doesn’t listen.”

  You actually smiled at that: just a hint, but it was there. You pointed to the drawing in my hand. “This is the place,” you said.